


Second Verse: Season 2

by Cards_Slash



Series: Second Verse [14]
Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Friends, Explicit Sexual Content, Found Family, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:33:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25426963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: As it turned out falling in love and surviving a revenant civil war was the easy part.  Now they have to pick up the pieces, figure out how to work together, hunt down the demons that haven't already been sent back to hell and find a way to end the curse.Oh, and all while Wynonna's pregnant.**While this is more of an ensemble fic than the first half of Second Verse, WayHaught is a secondary pairing.**
Relationships: Doc Holliday/Bobo Del Rey | Robert Svane, Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught
Series: Second Verse [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632727
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17





	1. Old Number Seven

Nicole could have gone all her life without ever needing to know the precise pitch of screaming metal. It was reverberated in the air, sudden and brief, before it went flat with such force that it made the glass rattle in the windows. It shivered along the floor and up the posts of the bed. She’d been awake as soon as the shrill and curling scream had started but Waverly didn’t jerk into wakefulness until the slapped-shut echo knocked against the outside wall. 

“What the fuck!” Waverly screamed as she jerked upright. Her hair was a rat’s nest, standing out in every direction from her head as she tried to fold it away from her face. The disorientation had her limbs spread out like a seastar as she grappled for anything that made sense in the quiet that followed. 

But it _was_ eight-oh-one AM. 

“They said they were going to send someone in,” Waverly snapped. She shoved off her blankets so she could stomp over to the window and yank open the curtains. The sunlight was brutal off the snow, twice as bright as the sunlight itself. The distant sounds of the revenants catcalling was just loud enough that it could be identified but not deciphered.

“Maybe they forgot,” Nicole said. There was no point in trying to go back to sleep. They weren’t going to quit until they’d collapsed all the RVs and collected the debris. It had already taken them weeks to get this point (much to Howard’s consistent disappointment). But the transport had arrived to carry the scrap and they only had it for a week. A week to clear out the homestead and the old RV park. A week! (Howard had said. Over and over.)

“It’s common courtesy!”

Nicole could have argued the point but she was learning that Waverly needed to marinate in her anger to move on from it. Rather than pointing out that none of the revenants could even get to the door to knock on it, she just threw off her own blanket (the only one that Waverly left her) and pulled on her slippers. 

Coffee at the homestead wasn’t _good_ but it was coffee and today seemed like the sort of day that was going to require it. She shuffled down the stairs and around the corner, rubbing the heel of her hand into her eye as she went. 

She’d expected to find Wynonna halfway out to shoot the first revenant she found, but the front door was closed when Nicole reached the bottom of the stairs. That meant either Wynonna had a supernatural ability to sleep through ear-shattering noises or she wasn’t there. 

Doc was there, in the kitchen, by the sink, with one hand wrapped around a bottle of jack and the other tipping a glass up to let it pour into his mouth. The smell of smoke was thick enough in the air to suggest he hadn’t _just_ arrived. His face went pink when the liquor burned in his throat, but he poured himself a second glass anyway. 

“Morning,” Nicole said.

The second glass was drained in seconds and Doc stood there with his eyes closed for a second, appreciating the warmth of a good (if quick) glass of whiskey before he turned the cup upside down in the sink. He twisted the cap back on the bottle as he shifted on his feet so his hip was against the counter and his body was facing her. “Good morning,” he said with more good will than any man chugging liquor at 8 in the morning should have. “They were more efficient than I anticipated or else I may have been more prompt in providing the agreed upon warning.” 

“Waverly’s pissed.” 

Doc pushed the liquor bottle back into its place at the back of the counter. “I apologize.” Conversations with Doc were never _lengthy_ (except for how long it took him to say anything) but they generally weren’t as awkward. Rather than stay another moment in the deepening silence, Doc stepped away from the counter to grab his hat off the table. He slapped on his smile as he nodded his head, “if you’ll excuse me,” and he was gone the next moment.

The front door had barely closed when Waverly stomped downstairs wearing her fluffiest housecoat and a pair of fuzzy slippers. She was moving like a woman possessed, on a singular mission to go and demand why the agreed-upon warning hadn’t been issued. Muttering something like, “...a piece of my mind…” 

“Hey,” Nicole called before Waverly could get her hands on the front door, “Doc was just here. Said he was sorry about not waking us up sooner.”

“Sorry?” Waverly repeated.

Over her head, under her feet, all around the pair of them, the loud scream of metal echoed through the house again. The shuddering slap of it slammed into the ground made the room vibrate so hard the glasses in the cupboards were shaking. “Maybe we should go to my place? Let’s do that. Let’s just go to my place.”

Waverly smiled at her, “I like your place.”

\--

The RVs had been gutted of _most_ things before the siege itself, but the purpose of that had been to dispose of furniture and loose items that could trip a man in a hurry to avoid being shot. They’d taken all that time to attach metal sheets that had been reduced to cheese graters and now they had to take all those sheets off. They had sledgehammers and crowbars to dismantle the built-in bits of the interior that might have made it otherwise _difficult_ to flatten the damn things.

Howard had outlined that it was _important_ that they do everything they could to make it as _easy_ as it could be for Bobo to do the flattening part because of the sheer number of RVs that needed to be stacked like pancakes on the transport. Not that anyone in the group needed any sort of excuse to destroy something. Nobody but Howard cared about _why_ , they only cared about which tool they got to use. 

Doc had secured a sledgehammer out of virtue of a lingering sense of gratitude. If he were a better man (banish the thought) he might have reminded them all that the whole shit storm had only started because of him. Like water freezing in a rock, he’d shattered the fragile civility among the revenant population. That didn’t matter to any of the survivors as much as the fact that they were safer now than they’d ever been.

There was _always_ satisfaction to be found in destruction, but half the joy of it was the force you got to use. It was the burn in your body, the resounding crack of the tool against the structure. It was the energy you put into reducing something that was whole to a scatter of parts. There was not a single fucking thing in the whole of this homemade barricade that was _stable_ enough to be worth the effort it took to swing the sledgehammer.

The only satisfaction he got out of it was the explosion of sawdust and woodchips. The wheels squealed when the hammer hit, the RV rocked, and the still-standing parts: the kitchenettes, the built-in bedrooms, they cracked and shattered. They split under the strike, like old logs on a chopping block. The sound they made was a ripping, tearing sound.

It filled up the narrow space until it echoed like thunder shaking through the sky itself. 

He’d left his coat hanging on the fence with his hat resting on top because it was hot as hell in the narrow confines of these tin houses. There was sweat slicked down the center of his back, settling into a pool at the waistband of his jeans. He could taste the salt with every lick of his tongue across his dry lips, feel the thrumming energy of his fast-beating heart spreading out from his chest to his fingertips. 

The impact ricocheted from the flat head of the sledgehammer to his shoulders and shook all the way down to his knees. He drew in a breath and dragged it back to start all over again. Howard had a plan about how it was supposed to go. Destroy, sweep clean, flatten. 

Destroy; well Doc could do that part.

“Shit,” David said, half hanging out of the door of the RV. This one had lost its stairs in the assault, so you had to jump into the doorway if you wanted to get in. He was holding a shop broom in one hand, clinging to the doorframe with the other. “I think you’ve finished it, Doc.”

Wasn’t that just a shame?

\--

“Put on a _shirt_.”

It wasn’t lost on her, all of the times she walked through the BBD door to find Dolls half-dressed and all-sweaty. How no matter what time she dragged herself through the process of waking up, getting dressed and making it to ‘work’, he always seemed to be waiting for her. She wasn’t enough of a liar to say that she didn’t appreciate the work he was putting into impressing her but sometimes,

Some _mornings_ ,

A woman just wanted to come to work and find someone that she could shoot between the eyes without being accosted with sexual offerings. 

Because that’s what Dolls was, a sweat-shined sexual offering. A quick and sly smile showing pink tongue and white teeth as he made a real shitty attempt to act surprised she caught him at it _again_. Every muscle on his body stood out beneath his impossibly smooth skin, because he knew how to look _good_ but he was still working out how to look good enough to get her.

“You’re here early,” he said when he could have been putting his shirt on. No, he couldn’t just put clothes on. He had to wipe his face with the towel thrown over his desk chair. He had to make a show out of it. 

“Demolition day,” Wynonna said, “ _finally_.”

“Right. They’re there already?” Now that he’d managed to mop the sweat off his chest he could pull on an undershirt. It was almost bearable to look at him then. He was less offensive in more clothes and not because she couldn’t appreciate how _good_ he looked when he was undressed. Flirtation was better when it was _fun_. “I didn’t even know Doc knew how to wake up before noon.”

“Ha,” she said bluntly as she pulled out the chair to the desk she liked the best, “I’ve never even seen Doc _sleep_. I’m just guessing he does.” The nearest thing she’d ever seen to Doc sleeping was the time she’d walked into the room with him and Bobo in bed.

Dolls sat on his desk rather than in his chair, sipping his coffee like things were _normal_. “Howard said that was going to take how long?”

“They’ve got the transport vehicle for a week,” she repeated (because it had been said, and then said again, and then said again, and it had featured prominently on three slides of the powerpoint and had been said _again_ ). After that Howard had given her a summary of the meeting with an additional page of corrections and notes that he had added _after_ he finished the presentation. “They’re only going to be at the homestead today, if everything goes according to plan. Apparently the majority of the scrap is coming out of the old RV park--you were at the meeting, Dolls. We were _all_ at the meeting.”

All of them and no bottles of liquor.

“A week,” he repeated (but didn’t address how he’d managed to retain no information), “and then we get Bobo?”

No, then Bobo would be available to share information. Assuming it was what Bobo wanted to do. The prospect of bringing an end to the curse had been one hell of an idea in the rush of adrenaline between the bar siege and the homestead fight. She didn’t regret agreeing to an arrangement but the more time passed, the more the realization sank in. 

They were all in this together now. Her, Waverly, Dolls, Nicole, Doc and a pack of demons. She’d put her money on the very same man that had been hunting her family for the whole of her life. She’d eaten breakfast with him, she’d had drinks with him, she’d spent _time_ with him. 

The more time, the more familiar he became, the less of a monster he seemed like. 

Everything was becoming _normal_ far faster than she thought it should have. Normal enough that Bobo had waved at her as she drove away from the homestead. Normal enough that she didn’t flinch at the sound of his voice. 

Normal enough she bothered correcting, “a week and then Bobo and Waverly are going over the research together. Howard’s got everyone convinced we need to _pool_ our knowledge together first and then we can work on _debriefings_.” 

Since they were still posturing (Dolls with his ass on his desk claiming high ground) she leaned back in the desk chair so she could rest her heels on the edge of her own desk. “What about your side? Any news from Lucado and Black Badge?”

Dolls shrugged, like it didn’t matter, and grabbed his water to take a long guilty drink. 

“We need to know what they’re going to do. _You’re_ the one that said they should be our biggest concern. _You’re_ the one that said we needed to lay low for a few weeks. That we couldn’t afford there to be any more headlines. Well, it’s been three weeks. What are they going to do?”

“As far as Black Badge is concerned, no news is good news. We can stop worrying about them, if Lucado was going to do anything she would have already done it. We need the information that Bobo has. We need to know how many revenants are left. We need to know how we’re going to defeat the curse without killing the…” his hand made a circle and he frowned at the air itself, “group.”

“So,” she said (even if she knew the answer), “more research?”

Dolls sighed and they both looked over at the never shrinking pile of books they had to get through, “more research.”

\--

Henry had been there when he fell asleep, against his will, barely dried from the thirty minute hot shower that did nothing to ease the ache of his overworked muscles. It was hard to explain where the pain had burrowed into the meat of his arms and back; hard to explain how it ached so deep into his body that it had started to feel like he wasn’t big enough to contain it. 

Howard had nagged him half the day, following him around in a hard-hat with his clipboard tucked under his arm. His pen nervously twiddled between his fingers, scowling to himself every time Bobo took an extra few seconds to crush an RV. Howard with his stop watch and his infinite plans, was probably still sitting up in his shitty little tin can house, working out how they were going to manage to collapse the whole park.

Pain didn’t change his ability to use his powers. A few hours of sleep and he was fit as a fiddle.

Bobo had fallen asleep with the idea that he’d wake up after midnight and extract himself from Henry’s long limbs and curled fingers. There was work to be done down in the bar, papers to review, things to sign. Howard had doubled his paperwork and Hui had taken it as a personal insult. There was no other reason he was being asked to initial inventory lists and approve marketing materials. 

There were, after all, some aspects of the business that he just was not interested in.

The room had gone cold since he fell asleep, the whole building had settled into a quiet dark. Even the air outside the window seemed to have gone still. No matter how hard he listened, he couldn’t _hear_ the sound of a man moving around _anywhere_. Even the smell of the room had gone cold, no hint of body heat or lingering fog of smoke. 

Henry was at the bar, standing just outside the only pool of light in the whole building. He hadn’t bothered with putting on anything but his jeans and even those he hadn’t buttoned, hadn’t zipped. A shirt hadn’t been enough of a priority for him to bother with but his guns were sitting on the bar in front of him, spread out on either side of the bottle of whiskey and a half-filled glass. 

“Thirsty?” Bobo asked.

“Always,” Henry said without so much as a smile. He picked up the glass and swallowed the remainder in one long drink. “You slept for hours.”

If that was an accusation or a statement, couldn’t be fully determined with how dismissively it was said. Henry looked him over, the way you eyed a stranger in a bar like this, like they didn’t know one another at all. His mouth pulled into a smile as his eyes settled back on Bobo’s face. “But you are here now,” he said.

“I was in bed too,” Bobo said.

Whatever mood Henry was in, it wasn’t the sort that wanted to engage in chitchat. He turned his glass over and dropped it back on the bar. “I was not tired.” 

Any man could be forgiven for finding that hard to believe. Never mind the day they’d had, never mind the hours of physical labor. Henry _looked_ like walking exhaustion. Even his smile was a struggle on his face. Even his hands, when they pressed against Bobo’s body, felt like they barely had the energy to manage it. His skin was cool from his neck to his waist, so that when he eased in closer to Bobo’s he shivered at the touch. 

But his mouth was warm, and the kiss tasted like liquor and smoke. The kiss was slow but Henry’s fingernails scratched their way down to the waistband of the shorts he’d fallen asleep in. There was no patience in his hand pushing inside of Bobo’s clothes. 

Henry wasn’t smiling anymore as he moved them until Bobo’s back hit the bannister. There was a table with the chairs turned upside down and resting on them. They clattered to the ground as the table skidded a foot to the side. Henry’s teeth were biting at his neck and Bobo’s hands were trying to catch up.

Trying to figure out what the hell they were _doing_. He understood the invitation, but he hadn’t quite figured out the intention. Henry didn’t seem to have a fucking clue what he was doing either, sucking red-hot-spots into his neck with a hand on his dick. Kissing him so violently their mouths tasted like blood as his breath went all tight and rapid. 

“Fuck,” Bobo growled when he had his mouth free again. He grabbed Henry by the waist and turned him so his back was against the bannister. He was easier to manage when he was trapped in a little space. All that manic energy could only do so much. He had meant to ask _questions_ but Henry’s head was tipped back and his jeans were half-off his legs. “We don’t have--”

But Henry was already dragging him forward with both arms over his shoulders and one of his legs wrapped around Bobo’s body. He said, “I took care of it,” like a promise and, “come on, Robert. Fuck me.”

\--

Wynonna had woken up early _yesterday_. Hell, she’d woken up at the crack of fucking _dawn_ yesterday. She had been up, showered, dressed and in her truck before the start of demolition and she had done it because there had been a promise that if they were allowed to start that early they would be done by dark and they would _never_ bother her so early again.

But here she was, head shoved under a pillow, drowning out maddening sounds. Any sound before eight in the morning was too loud and too persistent and too present to be tolerated. But this sound came in clusters and pauses, and echos and sharp twangs and low thuds and every possible sound in between. She screamed into the mattress before she gave up the fight to pretend nothing was happening. Pretending wasn’t doing a damn thing to _stop_ the noise so she threw off her blankets to do the next best thing.

Nicole was leaning into the window frame at the front of the house, holding a cup of coffee she didn’t appear to be drinking, eyebrows knitted up in concern as she did nothing but _watch_ the offending sound being made.

“What the fuck?” Wynonna demanded. She was wearing her fuzziest pajama pants and her thickest coat and the first pair of boots that she could pull onto her feet. Her intention had been to stomp out the front door and shoot whoever was making that goddamn noise, but Nicole presented a reasonable detour that had her staring out the window.

Doc was standing outside, with a cigarillo burning down between his fingers as he pushed a fresh set of bullets into his revolver with his thumb. There was an assortment of targets set up on the fence post, hardly the sort of thing that would present a challenge. 

“Is this normal for him?” Nicole asked. “I mean, I don’t know him very well.”

Truth was, despite the circumstances of these past months, nobody really knew Doc very well. He was _familiar_ the way all stories were familiar. There was the impression of knowing him because he slid under your defenses with his stupid face and his soft voice. He snuck into your life until you couldn’t remember what it was like without him. But a matter of months wasn’t enough time to know _enough_ to say that you knew someone. 

It certainly wasn’t enough time to know if standing outside of someone’s house shooting something just because you _could_ could be considered normal.

“I tell you when I figure it out,” Wynonna said. 

A bad idea had never stopped her, but it slowed her down between the front door and four foot to the right of where Doc was standing. She wasn’t dragging her feet as much as making sure her approach was obvious enough that if Doc didn’t _want_ to bother with her, he had enough time to get away. 

He didn’t move except to holster his gun. 

“Kind of early,” Wynonna said.

Doc wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking forward, with his head tipped forward and a cloud of smoke billowing away from his face. It was cold as fuck outside, barely past sun-up, in the dead of winter and Doc wasn’t even wearing gloves. Hell, he didn’t have half the layers any sane man would need just to get out of bed in this kind of weather. But he threw the remains of his cigarillo to the side as he said, “my apologies.”

That must have been the end of the whole conversation, because he was just _walking_ away. He was _walking_ away.

“Did you walk here?” Wynonna asked.

Doc did turn then, if only by half degrees. Only enough that it wasn’t _rude_ , before he said: “I do not have any other mode of transportation at this time.”

“Doc. It’s--it’s fucking cold.” And when that didn’t seem to matter to him (not even a little), she added: “Just wait a minute and I’ll drive you wherever you’re going.”

“That is a mighty kind offer but I must decline. I’ve been through worse winters than this one with less cover.” He tipped his hat like there wasn’t an entire conversation that needed to be had, and turned to start walking. 

Nicole was on the front porch when Wynonna trudged back up to the house. She was still holding the coffee she wasn’t drinking, squinting down the road where Doc was a retreating dark spot in the snow. 

“Yeah,” Wynonna said, “not okay.”

\--

The revenant population had been all-but-completely decimated. Now, Doc’s issues with the revenants were entirely based upon their apparent preoccupation with performing unsavory acts on his person. Had they simply left well-enough alone, he wouldn’t have seen any reason that they needed to be sent back to hell en masse. 

Those few that remain had either been smart enough to align themselves with the winning side, or unique enough to not want to get too wrapped up in the momentary passions of a bad idea. Some of them must have thought it was just-as-well to keep themselves out of the trouble. 

That was to say, Doc did _not_ know who among the screaming crowd of drunk and blood-thirsty men was a revenant but he knew that _some_ of them were. Just about then, hitting the perfect balance of liquid and solid, wrapped up in the sweltering heat of a mob, it didn’t _matter_ at all. He hadn’t come here with any expectation of welcome or safety; he’d come for the same reason as all the other fine gentlemen around him, sloshing drinks over the rims of their plastic glasses. Screaming loud-and-primal because there just wasn’t anything quite as invigorating as the fresh splatter of blood across cardboard mats. 

He came for the violence of it.

To watch the man made of muscles with hands as big as ham steaks and fingers fat as sausages wrap his fist around the arms of smaller men. He came for the broken bones and the blood and the savage relief of it. 

“Hey!” was too loud to be directed at anyone but him, too near and too close to the hand that grabbed at his elbow. Doc reacted without thought, driving his elbow into the body at his back and pulling his gun all in the same motion so that by the time they were facing one another, this stranger and him, there was already a loaded, cocked and ready gun pressed against the reddening skin of his face. 

The man had both hands clasped over his chest, and a cough caught in his throat, but he was gagging out the words, “the boss wants you.”

Whiskey Jim was there before the bouncers could move from their stationed spots. Neither of them had moved fast enough that Doc hadn’t taken out half the crowd if he’d wanted to. (And maybe he did. Maybe he wanted to see how many shots he could fire before someone could stop him.) Good old Jimbo was slinking in like he _mattered_ ; as if he were worth the time it would take to empty the entire revolver into his carefully impartial face. 

They had an audience, so Jim wasn’t showing his hands in surrender, but he said, “a word?” like waving a white flag all the same. 

Doc didn’t lower the gun and Whiskey Jim didn’t seem surprised or concerned. His arrogance was as ugly as his fucking vest, stretched over his compact gut. He had the look of a man who took advantage of a convenient weakness (and hadn’t he? Hadn’t he taken advantage of how Doc couldn’t turn him down the last time.)

Hadn’t he eased his tongue across that word _whore_ with all the same fits of humor that lesser, deader men had? Whiskey Jim had joined their side by default; because he’d been _alive_ and smart enough to stay that way.

“Doc,” Jim said to him now. _Doc_. Like _be reasonable_. Like _be rational_. Like, _be real_. Like a promise covered threat because they both knew if Doc did anything but comply his chances of victory were non-existent and his odds of survival were very limited.

Trouble was, just then, Doc didn’t fucking care. He had come for the blood and screaming and the _satisfaction_ of watching a man be thrown on the ground and stomped on. It was nice enough to watch when you were in the mood for it, but it was something _divine_ to do it yourself. He smiled and he said nothing.

And he shot Whiskey Jim in the chest. As close as they were, the impact knocked him backward. If he’d been anything at all like mortal it would have knocked him over. His face blanched white as the blood oozed out thick-and-brown. The edges of his punctured vest were smoking. “You stupid fuck,” Whiskey Jim growled at him.

The crowd had seized at the sound of the gun. The immediate shock of it cleared a bubble of space around him. It bought them a moment of confused quiet, when the screams of _break him_ stopped but hadn’t yet given way to the screams of immediate peril. Enough of the men in the crowd were armed that it was real _fear_ that turned Whiskey Jim’s face red. 

He didn’t worry about the bullet wound through his body as he stepped forward and punched Doc as hard as he could manage it. As slow as it came, as off balanced as it was, Doc didn’t have to let it land. He certainly didn’t have to make it so easy. But the pain of it was like a wave that washed from the brilliant pink place on his face over the whole of his body. 

His mouth tasted like blood.

If Whiskey Jim had been afraid _before_ , of mortal men with guns, he was _terrified_ in the next moment: standing there staring at Doc like he’d never seen him before. Lou had looked like that, only upside down, caught up in the amazing and awful realization of what kind of thing Doc really was. 

The next punch was a surprise, from the left, from a man twice the size of Whiskey Jim himself. It was like being hit with a house and it washed black-and-red over his vision. 

He didn’t know for sure, but he was pretty sure, someone was laughing as the world went dark.

\--

Nicole was _new_ to the force, at least _newer_ than anyone else. Her lack of experience did not indicate a lack of knowledge about the proper procedure for things. In fact, she had a better understanding of how things were _meant_ to go, both because she cared more about it and because it was fresher in her mind. 

However, no combination of training or experience could possibly have prepared anyone for the loud bang of the building door being kicked open. She set her water down and dropped a hand to her side because it was after midnight and she was _alone_. The bang was followed up by a series of short-sharp-thuds, an echo of stomps, a few growls and grumbles and an almost familiar sounding but thickly muffled bitching.

She eased into a more tactical position, that allowed her a clear shot at whatever was coming around the corner and put her closest to an exit if the first plan didn’t work out. But nothing in her wildest imagination matched the sight of the two men that came around the corner.

Whiskey Jim was familiar enough to her that she _knew_ his face but the other man was nearly two feet taller and twice as big. He was wearing what must have been a wife-beater in a better life so there was no ignoring how massive his muscles were. Jim stopped at the end of the counter as the other man dragged his burden another foot forward.

“Where do you want him?” Jim asked her. He didn’t wait for an answer and neither did the man dragging Doc across the ground. Jim slapped Doc’s gun belt on the counter and the massive man dropped Doc into one of the open holding cells. “Very nice doing business with you.”

The big man pulled the cell door closed.

“You can’t…” Nicole whispered. At least nobody else had ever let themselves into the Sheriff’s just to deposit a man into a cell. She cleared her throat so her voice came out _louder_ before she tried again. “I’m sorry you cannot just deliver prisoners!”

Whiskey Jim turned around just long enough to roll his eyes very clearly for her benefit before he turned back around and shouted over his back, “ _I_ am not returning him to Bobo.”

“Coward!” Doc shouted from the cell. He’d managed to struggle up onto his knees and work the knotted rag out of his mouth.

The only answer was the door being pulled shut and the quiet of the room when it was only the two of them in it. Doc managed to leverage himself off the floor and onto the concrete bench at the back of the cell. His body was sluggish with exhaustion (or injury) so much that his shoulders were sagging at the sides. His arms were fastened behind his back and his legs had been tied together at the knee. All his struggling must have loosened the ropes because they were unravelling at his feet.

“I do not suppose you have any worthwhile sort of liquor hidden away behind that counter?”

Nedley did but Nicole wasn’t about to give away another man’s liquor. 

Without distraction, the sharp halogen lights hit the mess of Doc’s face and made it _garish_. Half his face was puffy and bruised. The white of his eye was streaked blood red. 

Nicole might not have any training that addressed demons and semi-immortals showing up uninvited after dark, but she knew what she was meant to do when a prisoner was injured. Not that Doc was a prisoner just because he’d been left in a cell. 

They had a joke of a first aid kit but it was better than nothing. She grabbed it and a handful of wet paper towels out of the bathroom. By the time she came back out to the cell, Doc had managed to free himself from the bindings on his arms. He was leaning against the door with his hands loosely wrapped around bars, looking at her with more pity than a man with blood all over his face should give anyone else. 

Doc didn’t say anything as he reached through the bars to pull the dripping paper towels out of her hand. She couldn’t even say why she _let_ him, only a half-realized notion that he looked more _at peace_ on the other side of the bars then he had in days. She passed him the first aid kit and he nodded his head before he retreated back to the concrete bench.

Nicole had paperwork she could be doing (always paperwork in police work) but she dragged a chair over so she could sit opposite the cell doors. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say; she wasn’t even sure how she was going to _sit_. She went from leaning back to straight upright to leaning forward with her forearms across her knees. Her fingers were turning the key to the cell over and over between her hands. “Do you want me to call anyone?”

Doc was hissing to himself as he scrubbed at the scab that ran across the ridge of his cheekbone and over into his hair over his ear. He was grimacing so hard there was a fresh pink tint of blood at the corner of his mouth. “I am certain that everyone who cares to know has already been informed.”

“What happened?”

“I shot Whiskey Jim,” he said with a smile. When he was finishing cleaning the worst of the old blood he folded over the towels and dropped them neatly onto the floor nearest the wall. He wiped his fingers on his jeans before pushing his hands into his pockets and pulling out a flask. “I confess I did not see the second punch coming. Or any of the kicks that my ribs are informing me I have received.”

“Why’d you shoot him?”

Doc took a long drink from the flask and it made his voice husky when he started to speak again, “I dislike a man who assumes he has superiority over me.”

Yeah. Yeah, she knew that. Everyone knew that. The tension between Doc and Dolls had been outrageous even before the truth about Doc and Bobo had come out. “What’d he do?”

Another drink, and another, and Doc screwed the cap back onto the little flask and set it on the bench at his side. He leaned forward like her, feet flat to the floor by a pile of rope, one arm on his legs and the other gripping his ribs. “I do not believe it matters what was said, Officer Haught. I shot the man and now I am here.”

“You don’t have to stay there.”

“I don’t mind here,” Doc said. “Although as my head is pounding something awful and you appear to be in short supply of liquor and the effective remedies of my day have been outlawed, if you had a pillow I would not turn it down.”

Nicole had been on the fringes of a lot of assumptions that had been made about Doc. She hadn’t been part of the people that knew things when the worst of it went down. But she’d overheard enough of it. She’d caught snippets of conversations, knowing glances shared behind people’s backs. She had an _idea_ of the sort of things that had happened to Doc and how the people _on his side_ had reacted.

“What’d you do, cocaine?”

Doc snorted. “Laudanum. Morphine. Cocaine. I did every drug that was available to me. I have heard, since I climbed out of the well, that drugs are _bad_ for you. They are addictive,” and as he let that word roll across his tongue he dug into his pockets for a cigarillo and a match. “All my favorite things are addictive. Opium, liquor, cigarillos,” and he lit the one he was holding. He was leaning back again, filling out his lungs with smoke as his tongue ran across his bruised mouth. He wasn’t smiling, but the edges of his lips were quirked up, “fucking,” he blew smoke up into the air. “I’ve never been a good man. I don’t expect I’ll start now.”

“Your ribs would do better on a real bed.” They didn’t have a pillow (that she knew of) but they did keep a couple of thin blankets in one of the storage closets. If you stacked a few of them, they might be about the same thing as a shitty pillow. 

Doc was unimpressed by her sentiments, but he leaned forward far enough to take the blankets from her when she pushed them through the bars. 

“I don’t have laudanum but I have acetaminophen.”

But Doc didn’t want to feel better. He didn’t want to be comforted. He finished off his cigarillo and eased himself back to lay on the hard concrete with his head pillowed on two flat blankets like he deserved it. 

“There’s got to be a better way,” she said before he finished adjusting his arms and legs, before he could say he’d fallen asleep in an instant and given himself an excuse not to answer.

His smile was out of place on his face, but at least his voice matched the words, “sometimes there really is not.”

\--

Bobo hadn’t asked Howard at the gate if he’d seen Henry for the same reason he hadn’t called Wynonna to find out if Henry had decided to sleep at the homestead. (What that reason was? What that feeling coiling up in his chest until it felt like it was collapsing his lungs? He couldn’t say.) There was more work to be done than there was time of the day to manage it; worrying over the ones that didn’t show up to do their share of the labor wasn’t going to change what had to get done. 

Howard was a busybody with a curious pinch to his face, clutching his clipboard and looking back toward where Bobo had parked his truck. If _he_ was on the verge of asking where Henry was, he restrained the urge at the last moment. Instead, he shuffled them sideways to the first of _several_ RVs in a line. The snow around them was littered with bits and pieces of the pressed board interiors. The doors had been removed. The glass had been shattered and it looked like (on a few of them) someone had decided to dig into the hidden cache of firearms they never got to use. 

He’d brought his coat (because he loved his coat, and because it was fucking freezing) but he shrugged it off before he started. The energy expended to collapse the structures burnt through his body so hot it changed the color of his clothes. His back got so hot, he could almost smell it smoking. 

It didn’t matter where Henry had gotten off to. He’d find his way back (eventually). 

Right now, there was work to be done.

Right here, shivering in the air between him and the metal squealing in resistance, there was more than enough work to be done. He could see Dowdy trotting over, smiling in the same dull and stupid way he always did, with a sledgehammer resting over his thin shoulder as if it didn’t weigh almost as much as he did. 

Dowdy was still grinning when Bobo found the tipping point in the metal, when the energy he was pushing it with won out against the residual resistance. These ones weren’t riddled with holes the way the ones at the homestead had been. It took more focus and more energy to flatten them. When they did slap shut, they sounded like a clap of thunder exploding between your ears. 

Bobo glanced to the side, to where Dowdy had been standing, expecting to still find him there grinning like a loon. Expecting some kind of congratulation or greeting or a fact that nobody really cared to know but all that marked the spot where Dowdy had been standing was a dent in the snow and the sledgehammer itself falling over. “Where’d he go?”

“Oh,” Howard said softly and from farther away than he’d started, “to tell the guys.”

“Tell them what?” 

Howard wasn’t even looking at him anymore, but back toward the fence the same way Dowdy had been facing a second ago. He shifted his hold on Bobo’s coats in his arms so it was pressed up against his chest. It was a pisspoor shield when the only thing it had ever protected against was Lou’s skinwalker. 

Henry was walking toward them with his head tipped down (and no hat) and one of his hands curved around his ribs. He had a cigarillo pinched between his fingers that he threw out to the side before he cleared his throat to say, “were you going to run too, Howard?”

“You can’t blame him,” Howard said.

“No,” Henry agreed. He tipped his head up when he came to a stop in front of Bobo. It was just far enough away he couldn’t touch the man, but near enough he could see him with perfect clarity. 

So he could see the blue-black bruises down the right of his face, the open split of his skin from his cheekbone to his hairline. The white of his eye was filling out red and the eyelid around it was purpled. His lips had been bleeding (and recently) because he _smelled_ like fresh blood. Henry had a manner of standing, like he was _daring_ you to do something about it. And that was how he was standing there now, his feet set firmly into the snow and his shoulders tilted back. 

He had more bruises than he was showing, they smelled wide and deep and pronounced enough they must have been spread over half his body under his fucking clothes. 

Bobo closed his eyes and it wasn’t because he couldn’t _bear_ to keep looking because he could still smell the damage even with his eyes closed. No, he closed his eyes to find a sense of _quiet_. To find something that was calm. 

All that energy he’d been struggling to find a moment ago felt like it was ripping through his skin. The open weal of that mark on his back split along the edges and it _burned._ The RVs and the fence and the metal clip on Howard’s keyboard were all rattling.

That was anger without limit; anger without soul. 

In that moment, wrapped up in a thought so immense and so powerful that he couldn’t even find a _name_ for it, he was capable of _anything_. It simmered in his body like hell itself, spreading with his pulse, finding all those old paths that hell had taken when they cut him open and wormed their long-long-fingers inside of him. They’d poked and they prodded and they’d _dissected_ him down to the bones. When that didn’t break him, they’d cracked them open and set fire to the marrow itself. 

And in the end, the thing that broke him was _this_.

This anger that consumed him; the sharp, metallic taste of it on his tongue. The great hum of sound in his ears and the realization that he had become _free_ of the many, many things that had made Robert a meek and useless man. In hell, he could be anything, and in that moment when his soul burned to cinders, he had only been _angry_.

Henry had done this.

Henry had _been_ doing this. 

He’d been disappearing in the morning, and after dark, and sitting right there next to Bobo at the bar. He’d been wandering off like he couldn’t help it and who the fuck could blame him after the shit they’d been through. Bobo could understand the impulse toward _escape_ because the only thing in the whole godforsaken world he had wanted (before Henry) was _freedom_. 

It wasn’t that Henry was leaving, but that it was taking him longer and longer to come back. He was up late in the bar, drinking them out of whiskey. Out in the cold, making target practice out of everything from tree branches to passing cars. 

He was in their bed, touching Bobo by rote, like he was playing a part he didn’t want to play.

And it was all--

_All_ of it,

Leading to _this_.

Behind his back he could hear the symphony of screaming and he could feel it bubbling under his skin, how the metal folded, where it tore, how it _resisted_ the inevitable until it collapsed. He could feel it still shivering as the very last of its strength gave out. The ground was shaking as hard as an earthquake under the force of the collapse, echoing out with a dozen different epicenters. 

Bobo _understood_ the world with his eyes closed. He _understood_ the screaming of the metal and the breaking of the glass. He understood how Howard sputtered an excuse to leave, and even the distant-distant sound of Dowdy giving no reason about how they should probably just leave for a bit.

All this he understood.

But when he opened his eyes, Henry was still standing there just the same and nothing, _nothing_ about that made sense to him.

“ _Why_ ,” seemed like the only right thing to say. The only question that couldn’t be answered by anyone else. The how and who and when, Bobo could figure that out. Maybe his vast empire had been reduced to a handful of revenants and a couple of humans that were still scared enough of him to do anything he said. But the ones that were left, he didn’t need more men than ones he had to figure out who had done this to Henry.

But the _why_.

Why Henry had never come home the day before. Why he’d gone looking for a fight. Why he hadn’t come home after he found one.

Why his face was going pink right _now_. Why his lips were tipped up at the edges of his miserable frown. Why there was a gathering shimmer in his eyes. Why he didn’t even _try_ to say anything. Why even his attempt at a shrug seemed to _hurt_.

There was hardly four feet between but it felt like a chasm. Henry didn’t move, not even to lift his arms, not even to change how he was standing, when Bobo moved to hug him. He was as good as a skeleton in clothes, doing nothing but standing there and enduring the touch. As close as that, the smell of blood was stronger. 

When he finally said _something_ , it sounded like it was taking every bit of his energy to get the words out. He only said, “not the bar.”

\--

Bobo’s anger didn’t surprise him; what he did with all that anger is what surprised Doc. It wasn’t a performance. The only violence had been enacted against _things_ and even that had been constructive in it’s own way. There had been no shouting. 

No threats.

No demands for revenge.

No attempt to extract the details: names and times and places.

Bobo was _pissed_ and that was putting it mildly. As angry as he was, as angry as he was staying, his whole body was radiating the sort of heat that came off roaring fires. It had kept the cabin of his aging truck muggy with heat, and it had made the snow under his feet go slippery as it turned to slush. He was hot enough his skin steamed in the bitter cold as they made their way from the tree line to the front door of Lou’s abandoned mansion.

Inside was dust-covered and freezing, only discernible from the outside by the presence of walls and doors. The furniture that had been knocked askew by the flight of so many women in white dresses had never been put right but there was no sign that anyone had been in the house since they left it. 

“Can you manage the stairs?” Bobo asked, and like it needed to be explained, “there’s a fireplace in the bedroom upstairs.”

Doc thought about saying _no_ just to see what Bobo would do next. Just to see how far they could stretch this moment before they finally found a breaking point. That was the sort of impulse that got you punched in the face by a man you didn’t see coming. That was the sort of thing that ended with you waking up in a trunk, wrapped up in rope. 

Doc’s whole body was just _aching_ and that was almost a relief in it’s own way. At least he could _do_ something about it. At least it had a chance of getting better. All wounds that didn’t kill you healed eventually, and he would be tracking the progress of his fading bruises for weeks because every day it would be a little better.

It would hurt a little less.

And when the last of the bruises had faded, he would barely remember what they looked like. It would hardly matter how he’d gotten them. How, at the start (right _now_ ) it felt like the pain would never pass. 

Bobo hadn’t moved from his spot between the first and second step. He hadn’t stopped waiting for an answer just because Doc didn’t know how to answer him. All that anger that was making him so warm was just slightly too far away to break the cold around Doc. But it would, if he could convince his feet to shuffle forward. 

If Doc could take a step forward, that heat would wrap around him like a shield and he would be safe inside of it because Bobo was furious (oh hell, yes he was) but he wasn’t angry at him. He was waiting, one foot one one step and one on the next, to see if he’d done the right thing to bring them here.

Oh hell, he was so tired he could hardly keep his legs beneath him, but he nodded his head as he moved forward, toward the stairs and his lover, and the promise of somewhere _safe_.

\--

Wynonna had been reminding herself, for almost an hour, that Doc Holliday was a monster of a man that was _more_ than capable of taking care of himself. If he didn’t want to tell her why half his face looked like he’d lost a fight with a meat tenderizer, he didn’t have to.

She had been working through her memories, searching for proof that if Doc looked like that, the other side looked _worse_ but no matter how many times she told herself what she wanted to hear, she couldn’t make herself _believe_ it.

She started thinking,

Whatever else he was, and he was a lot, he was still just a man: still made of flesh and blood. Still capable of stupid choices.

And she remembered how he looked, standing in her living room, trying to tell her how his whole life had gone to shit. Trying to tell her how his options had been reduced to accepting the shit or outrunning the men that wanted to rape him. 

Everyone had a version of the events that had brought them to the siege. Dolls liked to paint it like an inevitable escalation of tensions brought on by their assault against the revenants. He liked to say that it would always have happened; that they provoked it when they went after Lou. 

Waverly didn’t like to say anything about it, but when she did, it was always quiet. She talked about it in an undertone, like they’d survived hell itself. That was what happened when you picked a side among the enemy. It was just as inevitable as Dolls’ theory of retaliation. They’d chosen Bobo and that shattered the factions.

Fact was, they hadn’t chosen Bobo.

They hadn’t picked a side.

They’d been offered a better chance at survival and they’d accepted it even when it meant that the odds of survival improved for the demon that had hunted their family. They’d teamed up to be an obvious target and a better weapon, and most of the siege they had been safe behind a barricade literally built out of the homes and bodies of the revenants they’d aligned themselves with. 

Wynonna had sacrificed nothing but at least she _knew_ the goddamn siege hadn’t been about her. 

Dolls startled when she kicked her chair back. He dropped the pen he’d been jotting down his notes with, looking up at her with genuine shock. (Had he been talking? His face had the slack-and-still irritated look like he’d been talking.) 

“I need to stretch my legs,” Wynonna said. It was a bold-faced lie that she couldn’t even pretend to sell with any authenticity. If she paused there, even for a second, he was going to call her out for telling half-truths and she couldn’t _quite_ figure out why she didn’t tell him about Doc. 

(Or maybe she did know. Maybe she just didn’t want to think about it.)

Stretching her legs took her only as far as Nedley’s office, with a rug that smelled like the 70’s, coffee and liquor and dust. He was sitting behind his desk, sipping out of his mug, looking as disinterested in the newspaper in front of him as he looked about seeing her in his doorway. But he raised an eyebrow when he said, “how can I help you, Wynonna?”

“Doc,” she said. She was going to add qualifiers to it. Ask if he’d been there overnight. If he’d stopped by this morning. If there was any information about what had happened (and who was to blame, and _why_ ). She didn’t get a chance to say any of it.

Nedley sighed without setting his mug down, “all I know is someone named _Whiskey Jim_ dropped him off last night and did not return his hat.” He curled his lips with distaste, “why can’t these revenants name themselves properly? Whiskey Jim? Bobo?”

“Dropped him off?”

“Dragged him down the hallway tied up.”

Dolls and Doc had found Whiskey Jim once before. Hell, Dolls had tortured Whiskey Jim before. He couldn’t be that hard to track down, and if he were, she happened to know a few revenants that knew more about this town than any of them. Howard probably had the address and phone number of every revenant left in Purgatory. 

In fact, she had her phone out of her pocket between the front door of the Sheriff’s building and her truck parked around the side, thumbing through the contacts for Howard’s name (as he insisted they all add to their phones) when she all but ran face-first into Dowdy. 

“Oh good,” he said, “I thought I’d have to go inside. I’ve been inside--hell we’ve all been inside--but then I was trying to think what I would say to get you to come out here…”

“Something like, ‘hey Whiskey Jim beat in half of Doc’s face, want to join a posse and hunt him down and oh hey, bring the big shiny gun?’”

That smile that always seemed to sit on Dowdy’s face flattened down to a narrow point on his face. His voice was almost always pitched higher than you’d expect, except just then, when he said, “Whiskey Jim?”

It was easy to forget (looking at Dowdy) that this kid had been to hell. It was easy to forget that he was every bit a demon that the rest of them were. His face was just more forgivable because it was young and slack and dull looking. But his eyes went just as red when he was angry and that mark slanted over his forehead burned just as bright.

“Yeah,” Wynonna said, “you know where to find him?”

Dowdy’s smile stretched back across his face, bright and murderous, “of course I know how to find him.”

But more important, or maybe as important, “where’s Doc?”

“Don’t worry about him; boss is taking care of him.” He half turned with his thumb pointing over his shoulder, “you should ride with me. If you want. You don’t have to.” Because of course he could promise to murder someone with his smile and worry over pressuring her into accepting rides with demons in the same breath. “It’s just, I’ve got a lot of knives in my trunk. It would be a shame to leave them all behind.”

“As a heads up, in the future? If you’re trying to convince someone to get in a car with you, telling them about your murder-slash-torture collection is not the way to go.” But she slid her phone back into her pocket. 

Dowdy nodded, “I’ll remember that,” like he actually meant it. 

\--

Henry hadn’t managed more than shrugging his coat off and even that made him hiss through his clenched teeth. He had a hand folded around the sorest spot on his ribs as he lowered himself onto the loveseat at the foot of the bed. 

God knows what kind of thing Lou used it for, but as fastidious as he made his followers be, it would be as clean now as it had been the day it was made. Henry leaned into the corner where he could see Bobo and the door, and rest his elbow on the arm.

Bobo had started the fire, but he hadn’t moved from crouching in front of it as the flames caught on the old dried logs. It was easier for him, over here, with just enough distance between them that he could watch every part of Henry all at the same time. When he got too close, all he could smell was blood, and all he could think was how much he wanted to get his hands on the man that had done this. That wouldn’t help any of them (even if it would make him feel better) so he eased back to sit on the floor with his legs crossed in front of him. 

“I don’t know what to do,” Bobo said because it was true, and because it seemed like the safest thing to say. “How do I help you? Can I help you?”

“You are helping,” Henry said. 

The back of the loveseat wasn’t high enough he could lean into it properly. It hit just below his shoulders, keeping him sitting upright even as his shoulders sagged and his hands rested loosely wherever they landed. His eyes were half closed.

“We should ice your ribs,” he said. Because he couldn’t _sit still_. 

Henry wasn’t asleep but he wasn’t really awake either. He said, “that is what Nicole said,” and, “if it’ll make you feel better.”

Bobo pulled half the pillows off the bed to stack them on the loveseat next to Henry. They were high enough he could rest his elbow on them, and that seemed to alleviate some of the pinch in his face. Neither of them had anything new to say, so he didn’t linger in the moment, watching Henry tolerate living in his own body. 

The house was bigger now than it had been when Bobo lived it in regularly. The kitchen was where he remembered it but it didn’t look like how he remembered it. For a man that liked to pretend he was living outside of society, safe from influence and contamination, Lou’s kitchen was stocked with a suspicious number of modern conveniences. Bobo found a box of zipper bags in the drawers and cabinets full of canned goods. If he had kept looking he could have found an entire house of hypocrisy but it was less important to prove that Lou was a liar than it was to find ice to fill the bags. 

Trouble wasn’t finding the ice (at least not during this part of winter) but managing to get it into the bags without melting it in his hands. The more tries it took him, the hotter his hands got, he went from melting ice to water, to melting plastic with his fingers. 

“Fuck!” he shouted at the snow, the ice, the bags, the trees, the house, and the world in general. Fuck the stupid ice and his own stupid hands and the stupid situation they found themselves in. 

There was a line of flower pots arranged along the steps, exactly the right side to pick up and throw. They’d been snowed into place, but between the blistering heat of his skin and the rage that was making his vision change colors, a little bit of ice and snow wasn’t enough to stop him. He threw them at the trees, at the ground, at the stone steps under his feet. He threw them wherever he thought they’d shatter. 

And they exploded like terra cotta bombs, spreading black soil and red clay across the untouched white snow. 

It wasn’t half what he _wanted_ to do. It wasn’t even a fraction of what he wanted. But it was what he had; and it made it easier to breathe again. Easier to calm himself, easier to do what he came down here to do. 

He filled the bags with ice until his fingers were aching from the cold, and wrapped them in towels he found in the kitchen. He fit them all into a canvas bag and headed back upstairs. He’d made it to the top before his phone chimed in his pocket, 

And he shouldn’t have checked it,

But it said: “Whiskey Jim.”

And nothing else at all.

\--

The dilapidated warehouse was exactly what she expected it to be. From how it seemed to sag while standing straight up, to how the windows were filthy and film-covered, to the smell of piss and beer and blood that cut through the bitterness of the cold. To the ruts in the snow where cars had been parked, and the trenches so many feet had dug. 

Everything about this looked exactly as she expected it to be. 

“Just,” she said when Dowdy finished pursuing through his arsenal of bladed weapons and slammed the trunk shut. She couldn’t quite tear her eyes away from the building, as if it--just this, just this building--had done something unforgivable. “So I’m clear, we’re here to send him back to hell right?”

“ _Eventually_ ,” was the answer. “But I wouldn’t worry about it, if you think about it, we’re doing him a _favor_.”

“A favor.”

Dowdy nodded, “better hell than what boss would do to him.”

They let themselves in through a side door with a knob so rusted it was half a miracle that it didn’t fall to pieces in her hand. Inside was all shadows and stink laid over a concrete floor. This far outside of ‘ _business hours’_ none of the lights were on. The cold settled into the dark like fresh fallen snow. 

“You’re _sure_ that he’s here?”

“Not sure,” Dowdy answered, “but seeing how this is his office and his apartment, even if he isn’t physically present, so to speak, we’ll still have our best chance of figuring out where he went if we start here. Now if you wouldn’t mind, miss, just head down this hallway here and wait in that lobby area outside the cages.”

Dowdy had the good grace to look at least _partially_ apologetic about how he had brought her for bait. It seemed as stupid an idea as any, but there was something about revenants that seemed to make it impossible for them to keep from gloating when they found her alone. She’d sent so many of them back to hell right now that she was giving good old Edwin Earp a run for his money but that didn’t seem to matter to them.

Maybe it was because she was a woman. Maybe the just had some stupid notion that her lack of a dick made her somehow less capable of shooting them in the face. 

“Fine,” she hissed at Dowdy before he nodded his head like a thank you and disappeared through a dark doorway. “But if I find him first, I’m shooting him.”

Three weeks ago, she couldn’t have imagined being _here_ now. They had been high on their own survival three weeks ago. The exhilaration of the moment hadn’t passed for days, when they’d finally gotten enough sleep to start thinking about exactly what it was that they’d done. Wynonna was not privy to the details of how the human bodies had been disposed of but there were scorch marks under the snow marking where she’d sent all the demons back to hell. 

She had only _just_ started to sort through everything that had happened. And only just now, right _now_ started to wonder about all the things that she had been accepting as fact. That these revenants were on her side now. That they were _decent_ and _good_ (at least as good as demons could get). She had been assuming that momentary alliance had created a bond between them.

But there she was, tiptoeing her way through an empty warehouse, hoping to lure out a revenant that hadn’t quite developed the same bond as her. Three weeks ago they were on the same side and now her fingers were itching to wrap around Peacemaker and make _anyone_ pay for the thing they’d done to Doc.

Wynonna had intended to do what she was told, to keep walking until she found the area that could be qualified as a _lobby_. Maybe Dowdy knew the layout of this place, but she didn’t, and she’d had more than enough wandering around long hallways and tunnels hunting for things that wanted to kill her. Only, the thick smoke of a slow-burning cigar pulled her to the side, down a short hall and through a wall made mostly of chain fencing. 

Whiskey Jim was sitting in the middle of what could only _technically_ be thought of as an office. And only that but the virtue of a desk sitting in the middle of the room made entirely of fencing. It was stacked up with boxes here and there, and the floor was covered in old cardboard flattened by too many years of being crushed underfoot. The revenant himself was idly lifting a sheet of paper off the desk with a cigar clamped between his teeth. 

There was a shotgun on the desk by his left hand and an overfilled ashtray to the right. When he looked up, he sneered at her with uncharitable distaste. “Now you,” he said as he pulled the cigar out of his mouth, “I did not expect.”

Sooner or later, Wynonna was going to have to figure out exactly how she felt about Doc because half the time she wanted to drown him in a toilet and the other half, she was pulling Peacemaker out of it’s holster, thinking nothing but perfectly violent thoughts about how much she was going to _enjoy_ watching the fire drag this man back to hell. “I like surprises, don’t you?”

Jim shook his head. He stubbed out the cigar and picked up the shotgun so quickly that he was on his feet and aiming at her before she fully raised Peacemaker. His eyes were glowing red and his teeth were yellowed as he growled, “you send me to hell, I’ll take you with me.”

Neither of them saw Dowdy. Neither of them heard him. 

It was just that one minute, Wynonna was weighing the odds she could shoot a man and duck out of the way of a shotgun blast in the same moment, and in the next the shotgun was falling back onto the desk. Jim’s hands slapped against the papers he’d left strewn across the desk as his body folded forward and Dowdy was there behind him, grinning so wide it seemed to split his face. Both of his hands were wrapped around the hilts of his knives, sticking out of Jim’s back as he turned them outward, and his voice was absolutely demonic, whispering:

“Those are your kidneys,” like it was a secret that he wasn’t supposed to tell. “You remember, before Bobo became the boss? You remember I had to work for Jack.” And with one jerk, he pulled both knives out. 

The suddenness of the move made Jim fall backward. He hit the chair but he didn’t land in it. And Dowdy did nothing but step out of the way of his body as it landed. He set the bloody knives on the desktop before he pulled another out of a sheathe under his coat. 

“Goddamnit,” Whiskey Jim gasped from the floor. Wynonna couldn’t see most of his body, but she saw his legs, his bent knees, his shivering feet, as he tried to work out if it was better or worse to stay on his back. “He started it. He _shot_ me!”

Dowdy didn’t _care_. He had a knife and the know-how to use it. He only looked away from Jim’s useless squirming to say, “this may become very unpleasant, miss. I’d understand if you didn’t want to be here for it.”

Staying or leaving, either way it was condoning torture. Still, it was easier to sleep at night when she didn’t have to _hear_ it. She sighed, “you can have ten minutes. It’s cold out there.”

\--

Doc had managed to get all the buttons undone and he had unfastened both his holster and his belt but just the _thought_ of having to move enough to remove any of it had exhausted him. He hadn’t been conscious for it and he hadn’t even _looked_ yet, but there was an unforgettable quality to being kicked in the ribs so that any man who experienced did not quickly forget. 

Oh hell, he _hurt_ and he hurt everywhere.

Bobo came back looking no less distressed when he left. Whatever he’d been smashing outside hadn’t done the trick at releasing the tension in his shoulders. Even now, when he set the canvas sack on the loveseat next to him, and hesitated at the edge of saying something, all that anger was lost behind the worry.

“Help me up,” he said when the silence went on a breath too long. He lifted his hand (and he wished he hadn’t) and Bobo held on as Doc did all the work to get back to his feet. The unseen wounds on his chest (and stomach) were singing with refreshed agony but his skin was itching with the need to get out of _these_ fucking clothes. 

The holster dropped on it’s own account, but he had to pull the belt free from the loops himself. Bobo was fidgeting to the side, but he settled on grabbing Doc’s shirt to ease it back over his shoulders and down his arms. They’d practiced this particular maneuver often enough to be experts, but never quite like this. 

“Pants too?” Bobo asked. He was already dropping down to kneel at Doc’s feet, pulling the ties of his boots loose so he could so he could remove them more easily. “You want your socks on?” (Of course he did.) And then Bobo undid his pants with a grimace and pulled them down. He threw them to the side because all that fury filling up his body had to have an outlet somewhere. 

Doc was standing there in his thermal long-johns, feeling more naked than he had in weeks, looking at Bobo grinding his teeth and trying his very _best_. 

There were a thousand things he _wanted_ to say. A hundred-thousand that he had practiced in his head. All hours of the day and the night had been absorbed with the idea that he could just _say_ something. That he could find the words that would make things _right_ again. He’d brought himself to the point of opening his mouth so many times that he’d rehearsed the speech he was going to say. All about how this had nothing to do with anything except that sometimes, a feeling just got bigger than you were. Sometimes you had to do stupid things to get that feeling out.

But standing there, he couldn’t remember any of the reasons and excuses and half-truths he’d been planning on saying. He said, “sometimes surviving a thing is easier than living with it.”

What a thing to say to a man who had gone to hell. What a fucking thing to say. But Bobo looked up at him with a sigh that shook through his whole body. He was nodding long before he managed to get his mouth open to say, “yes it is,” and “sit down, I brought the ice.”

Ice sounded like the most wonderful thing he’d heard of in days, but just before they got to that bit. Doc stayed standing just long enough for Bobo to get back to his feet, or as close to fully standing as he was going to get when he was reaching for the bag. Doc caught him by the arm and pulled him without any strength in the motion. 

Bobo moved with him, like he needed it as much as Doc wanted to get his arms around him. It was only the two of them: Doc’s arms sliding under Bobo’s arms where it was the warmest closest to his chest. And Bobo’s arms resting loosely against his back. 

\--

Ten minutes gave Wynonna enough time to wander from the _office_ to the _lobby_ to the bloody mats where the fights were held. She took her time about pacing around the room, following the splatter pattern of blood droplets, thinking about nothing at all (really) except for how sometimes the drops looked like circles and sometimes squares and sometimes they bled all together into blobs. Her former psychologists would have been _delighted_ with the variety of things she saw in the spots and blobs and long dried streaks. 

Anything was better than thinking about the sort of thing that drove a man _here_ when there were people that cared about him. (Oh but she knew. She knew _exactly_ what drove you to drinking and fighting and waking up hurt and hungover. She _knew_.) 

Dowdy found her at eleven minutes and twenty-six-seconds (which he said, like an apology) with his hands bloody up to the elbows. 

Wynonna would have expected Whiskey Jim to look inhuman. To be peeled apart and left open. She expected the gore of a Hollywood horror with a length of entrails tossed across the desk and God alone knew what else thrown wildly around the room.

But Whiskey Jim was sitting in his chair, bloodless pale and gasping for breathing, with both hands gripping the arm rests. His hair was so wet it was flattened to his head, and the arrogance of his face was stripped down to the bony structures beneath his waxy skin. Whatever Dowdy had done to him, you couldn’t see it looking straight at him. 

She said, “make your peace, revenant,” because it made her _feel_ better. 

When Jim was nothing but a smoking spot on the concrete behind the desk, Dowdy plucked a bottle of whiskey off his desk. “I think we deserve a drink, don’t you, miss?”

Deserve wasn’t the word that Wynonna would have chosen to describe the moment, but she followed Dowdy back down the dark hallways, to the door that had never quite shut, and out into the merciless sunshine. The whole affair hadn’t even taken twenty minutes from walking in to walking out again. 

She was sitting on the fucking freezing steps with a demon that looked like a dim-witted high school drop out sitting next to her, drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle as the chill in the air sank through all her clothes and into her bones. The quiet lasted longer than it had taken to find Jim. 

She was thinking about nothing, except how the brown revenant blood looked caked around Dowdy’s fingernails, and what he could have done to a man that didn’t show down the front. How many organs you could get to without disturbing a man’s vest. How much blood you could lose before you stopped breathing.

And how Dowdy had come to know any of it. 

How she’d gotten _here_.

“I don’t mean to overstep. I know that we aren’t all that friendly with one another. I know--that is, I have been _told_ that I can come across as annoying and I try very hard to remember that. I do try, miss. But all the same, and I hope you don’t mind me saying as much, I hope that you understand what it is I mean to say, but I wouldn’t worry about Whiskey Jim. Now, nobody’s said anything to me about the _plan_ but all the same, it seems like, if we’re going to breaking the curse we gotta start thinking about the difference between the sort of demon that you can trust in the world and the sort that you’re gonna end up having to hunt down sooner or later.” 

Dowdy was squinting out into the snow, turning the whiskey bottle in circles where it was resting against his thigh. His tongue was dark pink and nervous, stuck at the corner of his mouth as he took a breath.

“Demons don’t strike me as trustworthy,” Wynonna said, “no offense.”

“Some of us were killed before the curse,” Dowdy said, “sometimes years before the curse. I can--I can _almost_ remember, like I think, like if I try really, really hard I think I can remember I wasn’t always in hell. I wasn’t alive, you know, but wherever I was after I was shot and before the curse--it wasn’t hell. Now, that don’t change that I am what I am,” he passed her the bottle. 

She took a long drink and let it burn through her body. It filled up her belly with warmth that was missing from her fingertips. She was never much for philosophy and she sure as hell never bothered learning a damn thing about justice, but all the same, she said, “you saved Doc.”

“Nobody deserves what they were going to do Doc, miss.” He took the bottle when she passed it back.

Wynonna nodded and Dowdy took a drink before she got around to saying, “how pissed is Bobo going to be that we took care of Jim before he got to him?”

Dowdy just snorted. His cheeks went pink and a real smile crept across his face. His voice was back to normal, saying things like he believed them, “I think he’ll be fine. He’ll be _happy_. We did such a good job.”

\--

Lou’s medicine cabinet left a great deal to be desired. Either his cult had been blessed with exceptional health (doubtful) or Lou did not feel overly beholden to making their lives easier by providing them with too many modern conveniences. Of course, it would have gone against everything that Lou liked best to provide the women with anything to _lessen_ their pain. 

The best to be found was a dusty jar of liniment. 

Bobo didn’t even know what he’d been hoping to find. If he’d thought he was going to find anything. He had just needed to be _away_ from the room where Henry was. Away from where he’d tipped his head back and closed his eyes and fell into an uneasy sleep because the ice was easing the pain for _now_.

Away so he could check his phone but the only update he’d gotten was from Howard, who said nothing but that Dowdy was taking care of it. It was comfort, if not exactly the sort he _wanted_ to know that the issue was being attended to. But it didn’t make him _feel_ better.

Henry was awake again when he made it back to the room, shifting on the loveseat, peeling the bags of half-melted ice away from his chest. Every motion made him grimace until his whole face was wrinkled up from the effort of it. That didn’t stop him from leaning forward far enough to let the bags slide off the loveseat and land with a liquidy thump on the floor. 

When he was leaning back again, one hand curved around that spot on his chest he kept trying to protect, he nodded at the jar in Bobo’s hand, “what’s that?”

“Liniment,” wasn’t precisely forthcoming, but it was technically accurate. He pushed the ice bags to the side with a foot and crouched in front of Henry’s knees. “Undo the buttons, this’ll help with the pain.”

Henry was looking down at him, shoulders tipped back, chin to his chest, looking down the length of his own body the way he did every time Bobo found himself on his knees in front of him. There was no pulse of energy between them now. No electric sensation of _desire_ , of nearness, of anything at all. There was only how Henry hesitated, how he _pained_ he looked. 

“I do not believe that would be a good idea,” he said as the flat of his palm covered the top buttons, “not even _I_ have seen…”

No, of course Henry hadn’t checked. Of course he hadn’t even worried that much about himself to do something so basic as unbutton his shirt to look at what had been done to him. That would have been asking too much of a man that had been digging his own grave. Bobo was fresh out of words to describe how he felt. His body tipped forward so his knees hit the ground and then back so he was just sitting on the floor in front of Henry. 

“I did not see the second man,” Henry said like any explanation was going to be good enough to help him understand, “I do not remember what happened after,” he motioned at the bruise blossoming across half his face. 

(But Dowdy was taking care of it. It was being handled. Out there, outside this room, where the world kept right on moving, everything was being taken care of. Bobo wasn’t out _there_. He was right _here_.)

“I can smell the bruises,” Bobo said and it wasn’t what he’d thought he was going to say. All this time, all this quiet, he’d been trying to figure out what he _should_ say. What anyone was supposed to say. He’d been alive so long, he’d heard so many words, and no combination was the _right_ combination. So there was only, “if you don’t want me to see them, I won’t look but you should still put the liniment on.”

“What do they smell like?”

“Warm blood and meat.”

Henry was just breathing, just looking at him, just taking his time about shifting his hand from keeping the buttons closed to undoing the little white buttons. They slipped through the overused buttonholes with just a touch of his thumb. 

He stopped there, halfway down his torso, lingering on the button at the very base of his ribs. “You didn’t ask who.”

Bobo rocked back up onto his knees, shuffled closer so he could ease his fingers under the stretched thermal fabric to push it back over Henry’s shoulders. His skin was warm enough to the touch, not hot and not cold, and unblemished here. His breath was quiet as close as they were, but Henry was just staring at him like he’d never _really_ seen him before. His fingers ran the length of Henry’s arms, pushing the fabric down and down, catching only at the bend of his elbow and then where it bunched at his wrist. 

When he was done, Henry was staring at him, and Bobo was looking at the shape of the black-and-blue bruises patterned like giraffe spots over Henry’s ribs. That place he’d kept holding was the worst of the bruises, high enough up and under his arm that he couldn’t have been conscious when he was kicked. He would have been protecting himself if he’d been awake. 

“I’m not the only one that’d kill for you, Henry,” Bobo said. He dipped back to the side to grab the liniment and set to work, gently and steadily rubbing it across the worst of the mottled mess of Henry’s skin. They didn’t talk while he worked, barely did more than hold their breath like they were afraid of what was going to happen next. 

“You’re the only one here,” Henry said.

Yes, well. It seemed more important to be here than anywhere else. Bobo sat back when he was finished, wiped his fingers clean with one of the towels that had been wrapped around the ice like it was going to do anything but rub the fragrant odor of the liniment more thoroughly into his skin. He hadn’t been mulling over Henry’s attempt at an explanation (surviving a thing was easier than living with it) but he knew what it meant. 

He knew what Henry had survived, if not every detail, then enough of the idea to make an educated guess.

And maybe it was the wrong fucking thing to say, or maybe he was just doing his fucking best, at the end of a shitty fucking day: “Constance--,” no that’s not how he wanted to start. “I’ve never been attracted to women. Even before, even when I was alive, I had a woman that was going to be my wife but I-- I couldn’t stomach the thought of having to… To have sex with her. That doesn’t matter,” because it didn’t, not anymore, “but things with Wyatt happened, and I never told anyone and I was under the impression that he never told anyone. What I did not know, _then_ , was how everyone knew about Wyatt’s…” Oh, how to to say, tendency to fuck men that looked up to him? “Proclivities. I never told her. She always knew, as soon as she looked at me, she knew _exactly_ what I was when she saw me. She knew _exactly_ what he’d done.”

It had always _delighted_ Constance. Knowing how he’d been used, knowing how eagerly he’d agreed to be used. Knowing how it had changed a fucking thing about him, not his desperation to keep his secret, not his affection for Wyatt, not _anything_. 

“After she took Willa,” Bobo said, “I would have done anything to get her back. Willa was the only way _out_ of this fucking triangle. She was my _only_ chance to be free. I’ve been in this fucking place for eighty years. I’ve been hunted, and sent to hell, and brought back, and trapped _here_ for eighty years. I just want _out_. I thought I was willing to do anything,” he looked at Henry, “I think she only enjoyed it so much because she _knew_ …” But there weren’t words for that sensation. The phantom of slime covering his crawling skin; how disgusted and _disgusting_ it had felt to be used by her.

Henry’s eyes were red-ringed and wet. He was still mortal enough, still _human_ enough to feel things the way they were meant to be felt. A few decades in hell robbed you of things, changed you around and spit you back out so you were never quite the same.

“I don’t want to _survive_ with you,” Bobo said. “I don’t want to live like that anymore. Not with you.”

When Henry moved, it was awkward, and stiff, not at all as fluid as usual. He pushed himself forward across the couch so he was dropping to sit in Bobo’s lap on the floor. His arms wrapped around Bobo’s shoulders. His voice was small, and raw: “While I can be a fool at times, that does not mean I do not want to be here with you. _Living_ here with you.”


	2. An Irish Pub Song

Jeremy had, what his Mother had lovingly referred to as, an _expressive_ face. She had always said it with the tone of sympathy, like she was sorry for whatever motherly failing had brought this curse upon him. If he’d been half as smart as his mother he might have understood why she felt so sorry for him, but he’d always pulled funny faces at her so she’d laugh.

In fact, his face hadn’t gotten him into nearly as much trouble as his Mother seemed to think it would. However, it had failed to get him _out_ of trouble in equal amounts. He’d been studying up on how to school his expression into something neutral. Something that didn’t give away his every single thought and feeling. All the while he’d been practicing in the mirror, he must have been doing it wrong because for all his trying he could never have managed the singularly bland expression that Deputy Haught managed.

“Ms. Morton,” Deputy Haught said, as if this conversation hadn’t been going on so long that Jeremey’s coat had edged over from barely warm enough to a well-cut oven. “I’m sorry, I can’t just arrest someone without any proof that they have committed a crime.”

“ _Proof_ ,” Ms. Morton _yelped_. The pitch of her voice, and the rapid increase of volume had a way of making it sound like she had been slapped on the ass by a large man in overalls walking past her very quickly. “I have the proof! Last night,” and she stabbed her finger into the countertop as she spoke, “I went to check on the hogs and there six and I woke up this morning and there were five. I know that I am old but I am not senile yet, missy.”

“Ms. Morton--” Deputy Haught tried.

“ _Unless_ you’d like me to believe that my hog just grew _wings_ and took to the sky? Hmm? Hmm? Is that what you’d like me to believe? I suppose next you’re going to be telling me that my hog developed a sudden increase of intelligence and figured out how to open his pen? I suppose you’d like me to believe that he just strolled to freedom and closed the gate behind him?”

“Ms. Morton, I assure you--”

“I suppose,” Ms. Morton did not give even the slightest flinch of indication that she had heard Deputy Haught try to speak. “That my hog bought himself a pair of shoes, and he was only waiting for them to be delivered. I suppose that he learned to walk upright. I suppose he learnt how to drive? He just drove himself to freedom? I suppose that’s what you’d like me to think? Oh, of course you would. I see you, gallivanting around the town. I know what kind of thing you’ve been getting up to. I know who you’ve been getting up to it with! I wasn’t born yesterday, and you know, there was a time where the law in this town wasn’t so blatant about how it didn’t care about common folks like me.”

And throughout the tirade, no matter how loud, no matter how Ms. Morton leaned over the counter. No matter how many times her finger thumped against the counter like a hammer, Deputy Haught’s face never slipped.

“Ms. Morton,” Deputy Haught said in a voice that was _strangled_ with kindness, “I promise you that if a crime has been committed, I will do everything in my power to bring the perpetrator to justice. _However_ , I cannot do anything unless I see a crime scene and unless we can prove a crime has taken place.”

“Look at the pictures!” Ms. Morton screamed.

There were pictures. That was how the whole thing had started, upward of fifteen minutes ago. Ms. Morton had stormed into the office, thrown the polaroids on the counter and demanded that someone named ‘Bobo’ be arrested immediately for the crime of hog-thieving. And if he were unavailable, that arresting any Earp would do. (Except Waverly, Ms. Morton said. Waverly was a lovely girl.) 

“Ms. Morton,” Deputy Haught said again, “why don’t I come by the farm and look at the crime scene for myself? That will give me more insight into who, if anyone, could be responsible.”

Ms. Morton hissed like a coiled snake, drawing back and dragging her pictures with her. She said, “if that’s the best you can do.” She left in the same huff she had arrived in, leaving the space feeling too large and quiet behind her.

Jeremy smiled, lifted his hand just far enough to give a little wave, to indicate that he wasn’t going to be doing any screaming. “Hi,” he said (like an idiot), “I was, well, I was sent here to work with--wait, maybe I shouldn’t say. I’m sorry,” and Deputy Haught’s expression did change just then, like she was looking at a small, pitiable animal, “I was looking for Xavier Dolls? I was told he had an office here?”

“Oh, yes, he does.”

“Great!”

“But he’s not here. I don’t know when he’ll be back but you can leave a message for him if you want.” 

“Great!” he said again (like an idiot). “That would...be...great.”

\--

Waverly was locked in a death spiral of a pointless conversation she just couldn’t manage to break free from. It wasn’t just because of the language barrier, because Hui understood her perfectly and he almost never _said_ anything at all. She might as well been trying to argue her point with the _bar_ itself for all the good it was doing. 

“This is almost pornographic,” Waverly said (again) as she shook the shirt that she’d been given last night. There was a solid point in her argument somewhere, but it had been left to fester overnight, growing surly and disappointed with a lack of sleep and an even more pronounced interruption just after dawn. 

If Wynonna didn’t learn how to knock or just to _control herself_ and not bother people while their girlfriends were over, Waverly was going to rig up some sort of alarm system with an electrified fence that kept her room off limits to older sisters with boundary issues. 

Hui blinked at her so slowly he must have thought it was making a point or another. When she didn’t immediately see his point, he lifted his hands to draw the shape of her body in the space between them. He said _nothing_ while he did it, just drew an overly generous representation of her breasts and stared pointedly at the Shorty’s T-shirt she was wearing. Like the fact that it was stretched thin, tied up under her breasts, and falling off a shoulder made it _comparable_. 

That meant the summation of his argument was that her body was inherently sexual and the clothes she wore couldn’t be responsible for making it more or less. It wasn’t a surprising stance for a man from a time period where showing a well-shaped ankle was enough to arouse a man. 

“Excuse me,” interrupted Hui’s infuriating smirk spreading across his placid face. Standing a polite four feet to the side, trying very hard to look like he hadn’t been listening in, was a boy (well, a man, probably, but anyone with a face like that never really grew out of boyhood as far as she was concerned). 

“Oh, you can just sit anywhere,” Waverly said with as much friendliness as she could wedge into her voice at the moment, “I’ll be right there to take your order.”

“Oh,” the boy said, and then he pointed to the side, and nodded mostly to himself, and then said, “I’ll go and...do that.”

Waverly turned her attention back to Hui who had already started wiping down the bar with smug self-assurance. “I like the T-shirt,” she said, “and I’m going to keep wearing it. So you can just tell your boss, or whoever picked _this_ out that I’m not wearing it. You can hire someone else.”

Hui snorted.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said with more force than was necessary, “I’m going to go check on the customers.” 

When she spun around, there was only the boy that had been fidgeting by the bar a moment ago, Gary in the back corner and a man in a trucker hat that looked like he’d gotten lost on a through trip. Even for the dead of winter, and the time of day, it was a bit of a lull in the usual crowd. 

She’d been pulled aside by enough concerned citizens to know that nobody knew quite what to make of the fact that everyone had abandoned the trailer park at the same time there had been a noticeably suspicious amount of activity around the Earp farm. And now Bobo was running the bar but nobody had seen him in a while and you know,

They always leaned in to whisper this bit, just in case they were overheard,

Nobody had ever known quite what to make of Bobo.

Half the bar’s most loyal customers had been scared off by the revenants and almost all of the revenants had been murdered or scared off by them. That left them with an empty bar and bit of a PR mess.

Still, Waverly smiled at the newcomer as she dropped a napkin in front of him on the table and said, “what can I get for you? Coke? Tea?”

“What?” the boy asked, “isn’t this a bar?”

“Are you old enough to drink?”

And he sat there, as adorable as a baby squirrel, mouth hanging open and cheeks going red. He sputtered before he managed to form his tongue around any sort of words, and he barely managed to get out, “yes. Yes, of course I’m--do I not look old enough--you know what, you already answered that, and-- I have an ID.” 

While he spoke, he pulled his wallet out of his pocket and dug out his ID. It declared him a legal adult (and it didn’t _look_ like a forgery at face value). His name was Jeremy and he was definitely not from around here. 

“Alright, do you know what you want or do you need to hear the specials?”

Jeremy looked almost embarrassed when he said, “the specials?” 

\--

The bar was on the brink of being entirely empty. It was a few tables shy of being totally abandoned. Even the stools up around the bar were vacant. (At least in part because of the ongoing argument between the bartender and the waitress.) Jeremy hadn’t been paying much attention to the coming and going in the bar as he scrolled up and down his phone, waiting for any indication that the message he’d left for Dolls had made its way to him. 

Since he’d been absorbed in the hope of a phone call, he’d missed the moment when the stranger had looked around an all but completely empty bar and decided that, of all the places he could sit, directly across from Jeremy was the only one that would do. In fact, Jeremy wasn’t aware that his space was in danger of invasion until the table jostled as the man dropped into the chair opposite him with a grin that slid almost too far toward manic. 

“Did you get the tuna melt? That’s nice for you,” the man said. The only thing interesting about his face was how pleased his smile was as it cut up into his pink cheeks. His voice was dull, barely able to carry the _obvious_ amusement that was practically vibrating through his body. He reached across the table to turn the plate so he could see the cross-section of the sandwich and whistled like it meant something. “It’s fresh even. Good for you--what’s your name? Must have made a good impression on Waverly. Not everyone gets the good version you know. Some of us get whatever’s leftover in the fridge that fits in the microwave. Go and make it yourself, she says. Can you believe it? My money’s as good as anyone’s. Say, can you do me a favor and see if you can get her attention?”

“Waverly?” Jeremy asked.

The stranger nodded, he motioned his thumb back over shoulder to where the waitress had turned away from the still unresolved argument to stare directly at the back of the stranger’s head. Her tray was clutched to her side as her perfectly pleasant face lost all of the geniality it had been maintaining. She picked up a frothy glass of beer the bartender dropped on the bar with enough force it splashed across the floor.

“I think she’s coming this way.”

“Does she look happy?”

“What?”

“Is she smiling?” the stranger hissed.

“Uh...No?”

“No?”

Waverly recovered her smile in the last two feet to the table, but it was as fake as anything Jeremy had ever seen. Smiles like that were dangerous to men who didn’t know better. He couldn’t say anything without being caught but he shook his head to indicate that she was most definitely _not_ really smiling.

All the same, the stranger smiled back up at Waverly, “for me?”

“Depends,” Waverly held the glass just out of reach, like a mother dealing with a disobedient child, “are you going to tell me what the hell you’re up to?”

“Nothing, I swear, miss. I’m not up to anything. Cross my heart, hope to die, I haven’t done anything.” Every word oozed insincerity until it might as well have been a puddle. 

Waverly made a show of purposefully setting the beer in front of Jeremy. “I’m sorry, sir. You’re underage.”

“Bullshit,” the stranger said.

“I distinctly recall you saying that you were seventeen or eighteen. I’m sorry, I’m not able to serve you.”

“Seven--that was a hundred years ago! At least. Oh come on, I didn’t do anything. _Lately_.”

Waverly took Jeremy’s plate (which he wasn’t done with) as she turned to leave without another word. The stranger turned with her, rotating in his seat so he could follow after her departure with what must have been his attempt at a puppy face. As soon as she was too far away to turn back and stop him, he spun back around and pulled the beer glass toward himself.

“Wait,” Jeremy said, “didn’t she just say you were seventeen?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it, sir. It’s complicated--you know,” and he took a drink that left a foam across his lips. He lapped it off like a kid clearing off a milk moustache, “my own Mother couldn’t remember how old I was precisely. She always said that she had me and she had my brother and she was pretty sure which one was which, but all the same she could still be wrong. I don’t figure that makes much sense seeing how I have brown hair and he had blond. But my Mother, she had this saying, she said that it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside, it’s about what kind of shit you get yourself into. I figure she must have had a point, because my brother was taken in by train robbers and last I heard, he died when he was thrown off the side of a car and I was shot robbing houses.”

“Oh,” Jeremy whispered.

“Oh don’t worry about my Mother, sir. She lived a good life, my sisters took care of her. I think. Records are spotty at best.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s very kind of you, sir. I’d like to visit her grave one day, but they buried her back home. Although, Boss says if everything goes right, we’ll be out of her by December. I don’t want to get my hopes up because things don’t usually go my way,” and all the time he was talking, he didn’t seem to be _breathing_. “But I figure that even if Boss isn’t so good at diplomacy and all that, Doc Holliday could talk a wolf into giving up its teeth, you know?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jeremy said. “What’s your name?”

The stranger just blinked at him. He shifted in his seat, like it had just occurred to him that he might have made some kind of mistake. He didn’t whisper but talk low and private as he said, “aren’t you with Black Badge? You got the,” his fingers motioned at Jeremy’s whole body, “smell,” wasn’t what Jeremy had expected. “Sort of a disinfectant kind of smell? They must spray it in the lab or something. The last batch of you that came through smelled just the same.”

“You shouldn’t know about Black Badge,” Jeremy hissed.

The stranger snorted as he leaned back into his chair. “Excuse me for asking, sir, but how much did they tell you about Purgatory?”

“Enough,” he said when he meant ‘practically nothing’.

Any further conversation was interrupted by the sound of a door being slapped open with more-than-adequate force. The sound drew the attention of the entire bar, from the bartender to the sleepy man in the corner. Jeremy had expected to see almost anything except Deputy Haught from that morning. 

She was _broiling_ in fury, so obviously angry that it was a surprise that steam wasn’t rolling off her snow-dusted shoulders. She scanned the bar until she saw the stranger sitting at his table. Her breath was a great gust of noise drawing into her lungs before she shouted: “ _Dowdy_!”

The stranger’s grin was as pleased as it had been at the start. He took another gulp of the beer before he darted out of his chair, running straight for the back of the bar, around the stairs and disappearing through a dim doorway. 

“I knew it!” Waverly said from the bar.

Deputy Haught didn’t make any move to pursue the criminal, she pulled her hat off of her head and threw it on the bar. The bartender seemed to be doing his best to disappear from sight without actually making as obvious a run for it as Dowdy had. “Where is the bastard?” Deputy Haught demanded.

The bartender just shrugged.

Waverly rolled her eyes, “he hasn’t been in today, or yesterday, or the day before. Wherever he’s holed up with Doc, we haven’t seen him. What did they do?”

“Stole a hog,” Deputy Haught said. She was bristling with irritation, barely even settling down when Waverly’s hands rested on her shoulders to start massaging the tension in her neck. Her face softened before the rest of her. Her voice dropped too low to hear so far away, but it was obvious from how sweet and shimmery Waverly’s smile went that whatever she said was meant to be private.

Their sweet nothings turned into sweet kisses and Jeremy stared down at the empty table in front of him rather than be considered a weirdo for staring too long. When he looked up again, Deputy Haught was fixing her hat back on her head. “Right,” she said (mostly to herself), “any ideas where I could find any of them? I’d even settle for Howard? David? I need someone that can get me to Bobo.”

“Well, Howard gave us his phone number in--

“--in the introductory packet, right, yes,” Deputy Haught said. “I remember.” She was all set to leave when she looked back over the bar and seemed to see him for the first time. Her face was regretful as she worked out if she was going to leave or come closer. In the end, she came over toward the table, “hey,” she said, “listen, we really don’t know when Dolls is going to be back. You could try finding Wynonna. She should be at the laundromat. She might know more about how to get you in touch with Dolls.”

“Oh, okay,” Jeremy said, “right. Thanks. Wynonna.”

\--

“Come on, if you just do this for me? If you just do this one thing for me, I _promise_ I’ll never kick you again. Just this one thing, I promise, I just need this _one_ thing.” Maybe it could be considered inappropriate in some social circles to sweet talk a laundromat dryer in a flirtatious voice, but Wynonna _needed_ her clothes to dry. 

And yes, _fine_ , whispering sweetly into the coin slot wasn’t going to make a bit of a difference in the long run, but it _felt_ like it would. It felt like she owed the machine some kindness after she’d kicked a dent into it the last time she was in here. (That also had felt like it would do something, and it had, but not the something that she’d intended.)

The Homestead was great for a variety of things, like keeping demons out of her house, but it didn’t do shit when it came to making sure she had clean clothes and blankets. It wasn’t even that she was overwhelmed with a need for fresh blankets most of the time, but then Waverly had gone on a tangent last night about how skin accumulated in your blankets and how microscopic bugs lived in your bed and--

A woman needed clean sheets and clean fluffy blankets.

Specifically, Wynonna needed them _right_ now. She also needed the only pair of jeans she had left that seemed to fit her right. And if she could get the old sweatpants that she wore around the homestead while she ate handfuls of cheeseballs without a single shred of remorse, that would be great too. 

Maybe she could get that shirt she’d stolen from that guy in Greece. She couldn’t remember his name or exactly what he looked like, but he had a closet full of wonderfully soft t-shirts that she had repurposed as something nice to sleep in. The cotton was soft, and just thick enough to be warm, and it soothed every part of her body that had turned suddenly traitorous against her. 

Wynonna eased her coin into the slot, whispering through her puckered lips, promising in an increasingly suggestive voice that she’d never treat the machine so roughly again. Saying things like, “yeah, just like that. Take the coin, and dry the clothes.” 

(God, what was her life, when she was starting to turn herself on just by talking stupid to a dryer?)

The light flickered on over the start button and she fit her thumb in the worn curve of it. Her forehead was practically pressed to the cool metal at the top of the machine as she depressed the button with exaggerated slowness. Something clicked behind the button but the drum did not start to spin. She released it and pressed it faster.

Nothing.

She opened the dryer door and closed it again, still caressing the machine with softness. The button clicked when she pushed it but the drum didn’t move.

“You piece of shit!” she shouted at it. She straightened up to kick it over the last dent she’d left and smashed her fist into the button like the added violence would make the damn thing work. It coughed, and buzzed and she kicked it again so it started to spin. 

At the end of the line of washers, Etna turned a page in her catalogue, looking up just long enough to hum disapprovingly. “There’s other dryers, Wynonna.”

Of course there were but despite the troubles of getting this one _going_ , it was still the _best_. She needed these blankets like _yesterday_ and she’d already been at this fucking laundromat all morning fightng with the washers. Every part of her was ready to not be here anymore.

“Oh, you’re Wynonna?” interrupted her march from the dryer to the snack machine. The man speaking was as adorable as a forest critter in a Disney movie, caught between a perpetual innocence and a naive hopefulness that made his face bright. He cleared his throat so he could keep right on talking, “my name is Jeremy and I’m looking for Dolls, the deputy from the--”

“Nicole,” she growled (not at the guy) but at the hot redhead that wasn’t present. The one that could have just told Jeremy that Dolls had gone MIA because some dudes needed to go lick their balls in private. (Not that she thought Dolls was licking his balls, just that, taking personal time to recover his pride didn’t convey enough of her irritation at the man.) 

Come to think of it, her irritation at Dolls didn’t make nearly as much sense as it always felt like it did. He hadn’t been _happy_ to find out that she’d dispatched Whiskey Jim back to hell where he belonged, and his whole reasoning was that she couldn't just become a weapon for the revs. Killing demons was fine, it was _encouraged_ as long as those demons were demons that BBD wanted dead. 

At least, that was the argument that Dolls had been trying to present and it had sounded really convincing.

Trouble was, right in the middle of him trying to sound important she had interrupted him with, ‘ _would you let it go already? Doc’s a friend, and Whiskey Jim’s a demon. It’s not a hard choice, and honestly if you’re going to get this bent out of shape about every guy I’ve ever fucked…’_

Wynonna _had_ a valid point about how everyone (her included) knew that Dolls had more than a small crush on her and that consequently he had more than a small beef with Doc. The only problem with Dolls’ backward dick-brained thinking was that Wynonna and Doc were not still fucking. In fact, if everyone was being honest and all facts were laid on the table, Wynonna and Doc’s affair had only been a desperate (but _fantastic_ ) one-night stand carried out in the middle of a nightmare. Neither of them had ever even made the slightest attempt to pursue anything further.

Doc was practically a happily married man, whisked off to the safety of wherever the hell Bobo took him.

Wynonna was-- Well, Wynonna had gotten the short end of the fuck stick, really. But that was just the trouble with being a woman. That was a problem that she was _not_ currently thinking about. Just like she hadn’t been thinking about it yesterday or last week and would continue to not think about it tomorrow.

“Right,” Jeremy said softly, “I just need to know how to get in touch with Dolls. BBD sent me, to help him and--”

“I’d get a room for the week,” at least, “all calls are going straight to voicemail if you know what I mean. Technically,” as in, the reason that would make it to the paperwork, “he’s taking some personal time. That’s all he told us, that he had to go away for a few days and he’d be back. That was,” not yesterday and not Tuesday, but he might have been there on Sunday because Waverly had sent him the soup recipe that she was trying out. “I don’t know, three days ago?”

Jeremy was somehow _more_ adorable when he was manfully trying to accept his disappointment. The whole time she was talking he nodded, and at the end, he just smiled, “ok. Well, thank you for…” (Nothing) “Telling me.”

\--

The phone calls had started before dawn, and consequently, Bobo had been ignoring the phone since before dawn. He’d made the erroneous assumption that whatever it was would resolve itself. That assumption had been based on the _obviously_ incorrect assumption that whatever had happened to prompt the unceasing annoyance of his phone ringing would simply resolve itself if left alone.

After all, not so long ago, he’d been the top of a considerably sized demonic crime ring that had managed itself with limited intervention on his part. All he’d done was make a show of punishing the people that displeased him in a way that warned the next idiot that it just wasn’t worth their time. (And when that didn’t work, there was the fact that anyone that did something truly stupid usually ended up being shot by Wynonna.)

Either way, problems had resolved themselves.

Whether the current problem was a product of a reduced empire or Wynonna’s soft-heartedness, or the close-knit nature of the remaining revs couldn’t be determined based on the flurry of voice messages that had been left on his phone.

It started, by technicality, _yesterday_ with a long-suffering message from Howard attempting to explain how he’d been called to an impromptu pig roast in the middle of (in his words) ‘fucking nowhere’. Dowdy’s stupid giggles had been nearly constant in the background, so there was no question who the so-called mastermind of their present predicament was. 

Hogs went missing.

If Bobo had still had any reputation worth having in Purgatory; if he’d been even _slightly_ as scary now as he’d been four months ago, the whole fiasco would have ended there. In fact, it wouldn’t even have made it to his ears (at least not so directly or so urgently) because people were generally smart enough to know that levelling accusations at him was worthless. Assuming they even made it past Nedley, they never made it much farther.

Certainly, no other deputy had ever been so bold as to set off on a manhunt for his men. (Not even Dowdy.)

Point being, Bobo couldn’t figure out what had pissed him off the most, being pulled back out of the safety of Lou’s ridiculous mansion before he planned, having to _resolve_ to the issue created by the immortal equivalent of a couple of drunk teenagers having ‘ideas’, or the fact that Deputy Nicole Haught was _hunting_ Dowdy.

That was how Howard had phrased it.

If Bobo didn’t do something about this, Nicole wasn’t going to stop _hunting_.

As angry as he was, the bar doors threw themselves open on their own accord. The shiver of metal in the handles and locks fled before him before he could put any _thought_ into it. The gust of wind breezed back through the thick fur of his coat, made it wave and swish. The bar hadn’t been loud to start, just a bit of background chatter and a song playing from a far corner, but the whole thing went _dead_ silent at the sound of his entrance.

Even the old jukebox, made of metal like it was, choked off he looked for _anyone_ that could be blamed for bringing him _here_. (And by bringing _him_ here, had brought _Henry_ here. Which was far less than ideal and not at all what he wanted.) 

There were a handful of the usual patrons, a couple of faces he’d never seen before, Waverly by the bar looking caught between unimpressed and startled, and Hui whose only expression as far as Bobo was concerned was a bland kind of indifference. 

“Could someone _please_ tell me what was so goddamn important it couldn’t be solved without me? Hmm?” He closed the space between the entrance and the bar in long strides, crowding into Waverly’s space in a way that made her ease backward. It wasn’t that he wanted to intimidate her; it was that she was the _only_ one that might have any answers. “Could you help me understand?”

“Without you?” Waverly repeated in a voice that was neither quivering in fear or shivering in humor. It was just uncomfortable, caught between how terrifying he used to be to her and how mundane he was now. Her breath caught in a sneeze of dismissal, she shifted back another step. “I thought you knew about _everything_ that happened in this town. Why don’t you tell _me_ why you’re bursting in here like a bull in…” It was obvious she didn’t have a good end to her sentence, but she managed to squeeze out, “season?”

Hui snorted to the side.

“Oh,” he straightened his back so he wasn’t hovering over her as intensely. “Let’s see, could it be because I’ve been accused of a crime? That my men have been accused of a crime? That one of them is being hunted down like a horse thief?” 

And that that particular one that was being hunted seemed to upset Henry more than the others. He hadn’t cared much about the calls from Howard. He hadn’t really seemed that interested in the theft of a hog (other than some concern he wouldn’t get to partake of the roast that followed). In fact, they could have just sat the whole damn thing out regardless of the endless ringing of his phone, until it came through that Dowdy had managed to be identified as the mastermind.

The fact that Dowdy couldn’t be hurt by Nicole didn’t matter to Henry. It was the principle in the matter.

“ _Hog_ thief,” Waverly corrected.

“Says who?”

“Says who?” Waverly had ceased being afraid of him the exact second he’d questioned what she’d taken as fact. That was how loyalty worked, she liked and trusted Nicole more than she liked or trusted him (for good reason). “Says Nicole and…” she pointed sideways at the tables, “ _Dowdy_! You should have seen how fast he took off when she came into the bar. You don’t run like that if you don’t have a good reason.”

“He’s being hunted, that’s a good enough reason to make any man run.”

“Um,” was an unexpected, reluctant, almost apologetic interruption from the side. The voice was so small it took a minute to trace it back to the source. Even the man’s face seemed confused as to why it had said anything as he stood there trying to disappear where he stood. “Ms. Morton said her pig was stolen. This morning? At the police station. Why am I talking?” he whispered to himself. 

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t quite seem to fully look at or fully look away from Bobo. That left him with an awkward half-stare that settled somewhere around Bobo’s collar. 

“Who is this?” Bobo asked.

Hui said something not fit to be repeated in front of men who had the face of a twelve year old. It wasn’t helpful either as it didn’t give a name or occupation. 

“That’s Jeremy,” Waverly said like she _knew_ him. But the lack of any follow up information seemed to indicate that her knowledge of the man (boy) ended there. “He’s waiting for Dolls? I think.”

“BBD?” Bobo asked. He directed the question at Jeremy, who was still trying to sink into the floor while he stared at Bobo’s chest. As such, the kid didn’t seem to understand that he was being asked for clarification. “Jeremy,” he said as he snapped his fingers.

That managed to get him to look up at Bobo’s face for a minute, just long enough to wheeze out, “why does everyone know that?” like it hurt him. 

“If he’s waiting for Dolls why is he _here?_ ” Bobo demanded.

Hui slid into the conversation long enough to indicate that Wynonna had offended Dolls into taking a vacation and that none of them knew where he’d gone or when he’d return. Bobo wasn’t upset to have lost Dolls for the time being, but it left them one resourceful ally short. 

“Should I bother to ask where Wynonna is?”

“She was washing her clothes,” Jeremy said, and squeaked, “why can’t I stop talking?”

“It’s okay,” Waverly said to him, soothingly, “Bobo only looks scary and that’s only the coat.”

Bobo growled, and snapped his fingers so Hui would follow him away for the bar and toward the back. There was no chance they had half the supplies that Howard had _requested_ and that would need to be corrected along with the furniture being rearranged. There was also the matter of notifying the general public which would have been a piece of cake if Dowdy wasn’t _otherwise_ occupied.

\--

Jeremy was the sort of man that thought of the questions he should have been asking long after it was the right time to ask them. If he could go back to Lucado’s exceptionally cold office, he would have asked her all the right things. 

Such as: what the hell is happening in Purgatory?

Did everyone know about Black Badge?

If they knew about Black Badge, why did they know as up to that moment, Jeremy had been under the impression they were a _covert_ operation?

What was that dull-faced stranger who had been seventeen for a hundred years or more?

Maybe, most obviously, where the hell _was_ Dolls?

He’d gotten a pamphlet worth of information that was more about making sure he’d sorted out his personal affairs before he left on assignment and the general spiel about otherworldly things like demons and monsters and whatnot. That was business-as-usual for Black Badge, further proving the danger of getting accustomed to things that you just shouldn’t get used to.

Jeremy wasn’t even meant to be a field officer. That wasn’t why he was recruited. That wasn’t why he was trained. That wasn’t even listed in his impressive skill set. In fact, it was noted more than once in his file that he shouldn’t be allowed to leave the closed and controlled atmosphere of the lab. 

Point being, Jeremy was never meant to find himself standing four feet to the side of a man who had made no overt move to hurt anyone and still left Jeremy feeling closer to permanent disfigurement or death than he’d ever gotten. He’d seen his share of angry men in his lifetime and he’d seen a few in-the-flesh monsters.

What he hadn’t seen, not until that moment, not until the rumbling snarl of the furious fur-coated man vibrated straight through his body and made the very air around him seem to prickle up with heat. Not until he saw the skin around the man’s eyes darken into an ashy black and his eyes burn like coals in a fire. 

No, Jeremy had never seen a monster shaped like a man. He’d never had a moment where all the things that didn’t really-completely-make-sense shift into place like he had just _then_ , in that _moment_. 

Here he’d been, travelling around this town, doing his best to make contact with the field agent he’d been assigned to, finding himself in the way of what had just seemed like a series of dumb events. But he’d had lunch with a demon that smiled like a hyped up schoolboy and maybe worse--

Definitely _worse_ was how nobody seemed to care about it. Even Waverly, (who looked as human as any of them), was rubbing his shoulder as reassuringly as his Mother ever had, like it would be okay.

Bobo (a demon, a real _live_ fucking demon) wasn’t scary just scary looking. That’s what she said.

Jeremy tried to smile. He tried to nod along with her assurances. He tried but the roll of his gut and the growing sensation of being trapped in skin that was suddenly too small to hold him was closing in around him. The walls were squeezing in tighter and the bar seemed to superheat all around him. 

His mouth opened in some attempt to excuse himself, or to thank her, but all that came out was a noise. Like a whimper or a mouse squeak, it was only a long shallow sound as he turned his feet toward the exit and made a run for it. 

His feet carried him through both sets of doors and off the sidewalk beyond. They slid in the slush of snow between the curb and street and sent him careening forward into the still-warm front end of a dirty truck. The impact rattled loose his guts that weren’t doing a decent job of containing themselves to start.

Every nerve in his body screamed in unison as he bent over and puked in the snow. In that moment he was deaf and blind and completely oblivious to anything around him. Just as quick as it came, it swept away. 

He heard the scrape of shoes on the dryer part of the street before the creak of the truck shifting as weight that had been leaning against it moved from one place to another. The filter of tobacco cut into the sourness of the vomit and the icy taste of the cold. Jeremy’s whole body was overheated and sweat soaked making it easy for the cold to cut through his clothes and straight into his bones. 

His plan had involved staring at the ground until his stomach stopped churning, but a hand extended into the edge of his line of sight, offering a battered hip flask that smelled of some warm and strong. “Swish and spit,” was the most useful and most calm thing he’d heard all day. It was the kind of voice that could talk a man back from a ledge. The kind of thing you closed your eyes to listen to more closely. 

Jeremy didn’t want to accept any kindness from a town that didn’t seem to mind it’s population of demons, but between his mouth and his gut, everything smelled and tasted disgusting. He took the flask with shivering fingers and straightened up just enough he could tip a bit into his mouth. 

It burned like a cleaning fire, washing out the taste and the cold. His face flushed when he doubled over to spit, but it was still _better_. He straightened up with every intention of handing the flask back and thanking whoever had the misfortune to witness his distress. 

Such a solid plan should have been easy to follow, but that was before Jeremy had let his eyes travel up from the thick-and-perfectly fitted gun belt sitting on the strangers hips, across every single one of his vest buttons and along the length of the man’s neck and over his jaw. Before Jeremy got caught in the dozens of little details, like how well shaped the man’s jaw was, and how perfectly his clothes seemed to cling to his body. How his hips were angled out and his shoulders were leaning back, seeing to stretch the length of his torso, to invite your eyes to take their time on the journey from belt buckle to--

To the twitch of his lips, drawn up in a smile that wasn’t smug enough to be offensive but too confident to be anything but aware. This was a man that shouldn’t have been half as attractive as he wound up being, offering such a smile that you couldn’t help but smiling back. From the absurdness of his moustache to the little wrinkles next to his perfect blue eyes, there was nothing about this stranger that Jeremy would have listed as _hot_ prior to this moment.

And now he was standing next to a puddle of his own puke, struck dumb (again) because he couldn’t remember the last time he laid eyes on a man like this before. There was just _something_.

Jeremy was only aware that he was holding the flask out when the man’s smile quirked up into actual amusement.

“Maybe you ought to keep that a moment longer,” he said and his voice was as unbelievable as his stupid face. As his stupid clothes that fit his stupid body like they’d be stitched on him. “You’re looking a little peaked.”

A drink certainly sounded like a great idea when this wonderful stranger was suggesting it. At least, that’s what Jeremy told himself as he tipped the flask up and poured the liquor into his mouth again. He must have forgotten how it burned across his tongue the last time because it was a shock but he swallowed it anyway. “Thanks,” he croaked.

“My pleasure,” the man assured him. He took the flask back and tucked it into a pocket in his coat. “You are hardly the first man to have such a reaction to this particular bar and it’s present owner. He is something of an _acquired_ taste.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy agreed (without any real idea what he was agreeing with). He even nodded just to see the man smile at him again.

There they were, standing in the cold, nodding along with one another like a couple of bobble heads. The smile on the stranger’s face not showing the slightest inclination of fading. 

“I’m Jeremy,” he said. Nobody had asked, but it felt like he should mention it. “Are you...uh...are you from around here?” (What the actual fuck was he even saying?)

“In a manner of speaking,” the stranger said, “and yourself?”

“Oh,” Jeremy was looking for something to lean against, although leaning didn’t look nearly as good on him as it did on this man. He stumbled away from the now freezing puddle (of his vomit) in search of somewhere to put his body and ended up just standing awkwardly in front of the man. “No, no I’m here on a--a work assignment.” Which didn’t sound very impressive at all. “Top secret type stuff. I’m--I’m basically a secret agent.”

That earned him a gently raised eyebrow. It could have been counted as being impressed if it weren’t for how the man was _still_ smiling at him (but not meanly) as he lifted his cigarillo to his mouth. Just before it got to his mouth, he said, “Black Badge, I wager?”

Jeremy was _definitely_ writing a strongly worded complaint against Lucado as soon as he _found_ Dolls. While it should have been worrying, or even disappointing, that this man could be a demon or in league with demons, Jeremy couldn’t bring himself to worry too much about it. “Oh cool,” he said by way of recovering the moment, “so you’ve uh--you’ve heard of us?”

The man’s expression shifted for the first time since the encounter began. It wasn’t necessarily that it darkened or that it went unfriendly. No, it was more that the smile slipped a degree and the man straightened up to his full height because he felt bad about the whole thing. He went so far as to flick the cigarillo to the side. “I have done a little more than just _hear_ of you. I suppose you are here in an attempt to locate our dear, dear missing friend, Deputy Marshal Dolls. Well, allow me to assuage your concerns, he is most definitely alive and well.”

That was the most confident anyone had been in regards to Dolls. 

“So you know where he is?”

“As he has not yet made his intentions toward myself as clear as I would like, I do make it a priority to keep track of the man. Even if I were not so inclined, his subconscious enthusiasm for my person makes it nearly impossible for him to _keep_ from informing me where he is. At present, he is taking a much needed sabbatical in the woods. And I say much needed not only to mean that it will do him some good, but that it will give me a _holiday_ from getting in trouble for things that I am not responsible for.” His hand touched his own chest in a way that was clearly meant to indicate that he had never done a thing wrong in all his life. His other hand was resting on Jeremy’s shoulder.

“Right?” 

“I mean, should I be held responsible for another man’s attraction to me?” He even made it sound like it was the stupidest thing he ever heard, and why wouldn’t it be. When you were that attractive (against all odds) there was nothing you could do but accept that people would lust after you. “But more to the point, and what I am sure that you are here to uncover is that Deputy Marshal Dolls will return to his post as soon as his pride has recovered. Perhaps even sooner now that I have returned after my own confinement.”

Jeremy didn’t understand half of what was said to him, but it all sounded great. 

The man’s hand squeezed his shoulder before it dropped away. That was signalling the end of the conversation that Jeremy couldn’t scrape together enough brain cells to continue. He was saved from any unfortunate attempts by the interruptive and rudely loud honk of a truck that pulled into the same parking space he was standing at a speed that couldn’t have been legal. 

It brought the smell of fresh roasted pork and exhaust and something that might be best described as brimstone. The engine had barely even been turned off before the whole vehicle was squealing in mighty protest. The door nearest Jeremy opened, and a harassed looking man clutching a pack of paper plates to his chest all but fell out.

“Doc!” he shouted, “oh, _perfect_! We’ve got everything set.”

Everything he was saying had to be loud enough to be heard over the high squeal of a half-rusted tailgate being abruptly knocked open. The roundest and heaviest man that Jeremy had ever seen rolled out of the end of the truck and landed on the street with a comically loud crack of noise. 

“And we need you,” the man with the paper plates was saying as he ushered Doc toward the end of the truck, “to go and find this Ms. uh--ms?? Where’s my papers?”

Jeremy was just guessing when he said: “Morton?”

“Yes! Ms. Morton. We need you to let her know how sorry we are and also that we would be honored to have her as our guest.” Paper plate man reached up to pluck open a button at the top of Doc’s shirt and dusted off his shoulders like there was something there that needed clearing away. “Wynonna said she was at the diner so if you could handle that--”

“ _If_ ,” Doc huffed. “What about Dowdy?”

“Oh, don’t worry about Dowdy. Nobody can catch Dowdy. More than likely he’s having the time of his life. Don’t worry about Dowdy, just go take care of Ms. Morton.”

The round man at the end of the truck had taken hold of two massive skewers and hauled a whole hog halfway out of the truck bed without even the slightest sign of strain. There was nothing _human_ about that kind of feat, so Jeremy was all set to excuse himself to somewhere safer when his attempt at escape was interrupted by plowing face first into--

“Whoa, hey there, not on the first date.” Wynonna. She had one arm around him so he didn’t fall and the other out to the side pointing at the hog now being carried by all three men who got out of the truck. “Are we eating that?”

“As soon as the rest of the food arrives,” the paper plate guy said. “We’ll even wave the cover charge for you seeing how we’re associates.”

Associates?

“Alright,” Wynonna said with far too much glee. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t shoot you.”

That brought about a chorus of good natured cheers as Wynonna dragged him back toward the bar to get the doors open for the men and the pig. Jeremy had _definitely_ meant to be getting farther away but he kept getting closer.

“Stick around,” Wynonna said when they were both back in the bar (currently being re-arranged by the patrons rather than the employees). “We’ll take care of you until Dolls gets back.”

\--

Nicole had been _literally_ chasing Dowdy for the past half mile, on foot, after sundown. She was too cold and too hot and too tired and too fucking fed up to have any goodwill left. By the time he skidded into Shorty’s open doorway she was going to shoot him _just because_. It didn’t matter to her that there were witnesses. It didn’t matter that it wouldn’t really _do_ anything.

It just mattered that he’d take it personally. That it might displace that wide grin across his pink face as he turned on his heels and danced backward into the bar. 

The bar that had been empty the last time she’d been in it. The bar that had been lackluster in attracting new customers ever since the rebuild. But it was full to the brim now, pounding out music that was a half-turn of the volume knob too _loud_. People were shouting over the sound, spread out across every surface with bibs and overflowing plates. They were chatting across mountains of food, standing everywhere balancing dinner rolls and bottled beers and plates as they laughed along with one another.

Dowdy was too short to follow through the crowd, and too good at sliding into spaces nobody should fit through. Even if there had been a point in trying to follow him, she wouldn’t have been able to get around the crush of elbows and plastic cutlery. 

The only place the overcrowding thinned out was behind the bar. She’d expected to find Waverly and Hui there, trying to keep up with the demand for drinks. What she hadn’t expected was to find Ms. Morton herself, happily wiping her fingers on a napkin with a spread of plates that was covered in every time of food Nicole could remember off the top of her head.

And standing, not even a full four feet away, was goddamn Bobo Del Rey, stripped out of his ridiculous coat and leaning forward with his elbows against the bar as he watched the carrying on around him like it _pleased_ him. 

It was hard to know which of them she wanted to punch first, the woman who had threatened to call the state cops and the prime minister and the local news channel or the bastard that had disappeared without warning and left his demon friends to get up to whatever the hell they wanted to. 

In fact, Nicole was going to shoot him. Just as soon as she got a free minute and a place with no witnesses, she was going to shoot Bobo somewhere it would hurt. 

Before she could do anything (like scream) Waverly appeared from the side, looking positively pink and sparkling from the heat of the bar. She wrapped both arms around Nicole as she snuggled up against her body with no question about her intentions. Her smile was bedroom-wicked as she leaned in so she could get away with not quite shouting:

“Bobo brought Doc back finally. Wynonna hasn’t left him alone since she saw him, if we leave now we should have hours to ourselves.” And when she pulled back she winked in a way that did nothing to make her smile seem innocent.

“But,” Nicole pointed over at the pig and the food and the plates. 

“I saved you some,” Waverly promised, “we’ll come back when the crowd dies down.”

But, they probably wouldn’t. 


	3. Old Time Religion

The phone call did not wake her up. 

The cold had slithered under the only blanket she had managed to save from Waverly’s thieving fingers. While Nicole was curled into a ball for warmth, too cold to sleep under a throw, Waverly was safely cocooned in her piles of bed linens. It was as adorable as it was irritating. Three weeks ago, it had been _endearing_ , because the privilege of being able to wake up cold next to Waverly was so fresh and so unique that she was willing to be forgiving. It had felt like a small hurdle, made even more insignificant by the fact that there had been a minor demon war they’d only just escaped.

Thing was, Nicole didn’t need half as many blankets as Waverly but she needed _some_. Especially at the Earp Homestead where cold breezed through the walls like sunlight through sheets of paper. It didn’t matter how many blankets she started out with, they always ended up with Waverly before dawn. Even that was endearing in it’s own way, but that didn’t make sleeping next to her in the bitterest part of winter any more restful.

Nicole wasn’t _angry_ because there was a solution and she was sure to find it, but she was _tired_.

And cold.

And happy despite it.

Until the phone rang.

\--

The third time, as it turned out, was not the charm.

Not that Wynonna had even gotten to fuck Doc three times. (Not she wanted to, but if she’d been given the option, she definitely would have thought about taking it. There was a world full of lovers she hadn’t tested out yet and a pretty full personal history of ones she had. Doc wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to her vagina but he was certainly a top contender if only because he had just been so _willing_. So easily moved, so happy to please, so--)

Point was, Wynonna had only fucked Doc once.

Outside.

In the dirt.

And it couldn’t be said enough that she’d fucked him _once_. One singular time. Uno. 

One fuck and two goddamn lines on all three goddamn pregnancy sticks. 

“Wynonna!” Maybe it was Nicole’s height, or her vocation or maybe her very odd fondness for recreational exercise, but she always seemed to move _faster_ than expected. She arrived just seconds after the sound of the shout, coming around the corner of the bathroom just as Wynonna’s attempts to swipe all the evidence in the trash ended with everything falling on the floor. Nicole’s face was exertion pink with her mouth open like she was going to explain--

Except there was a scatter of positive pregnancy tests and empty boxes on the floor. Maybe they were the _cheapest_ version of the test she could find at the drugstore but even with a noticeably lacking quality of graphic design, they still had the words HOME and PREGNANCY splashed across them.

Nicole’s eyes went as big as full moons, taking up half her face as her open mouth snapped shut and then popped open again to hiss, “you’re _pregnant_?”

Kicking the evidence to the side wasn’t going to do anything at all, but it still felt like she _should_. Wynonna put her body between Nicole’s pointing finger and the boxes on the ground. “In a manner of speaking,” she said like it just didn’t matter.

Like it wasn’t going to change anything.

Like she was anyone’s idea of a mother.

Like Doc was anyone’s idea of a father.

Like this wasn’t going to seriously fuck up not only her waistline but their burgeoning truce between Earps and demon outlaws. “Yes,” she said with no confidence, “yes I am. I am and you can’t tell _anyone_.”

Nicole was nodding but the words didn’t seem to make it past her slack face. When she did finally say _anything_ , she said, “who's the father?” 

It was easy to forget that Nicole hadn’t always been part of the shitty Earp family because she just fit in _so_ well. Nothing seemed to be too outrageous to her. Being accepting of unbelievable shit was the most key element to being able to withstand the Earps. And Nicole hadn’t so much as batted a single eyelash about demons and immortal gunslingers and magic guns. She’d just taken it in stride.

But she _hadn’t_ always been there.

“Doc?” Wynonna said (and she hadn’t meant it to be a question. But she couldn’t imagine anyone that did _not_ know). 

“What about Bobo?” 

“He’s kind of gay.” That wasn’t the answer to what was being asked. Wynonna crouched low enough to grab all of the evidence because _Waverly_ could not find out like this. Maybe Nicole could keep a secret but Waverly had never met a secret that she didn’t want to tell everyone. “Nicole,” she said with her arm full of pregnancy sticks, “you cannot tell anyone. Okay? You can’t tell _anyone_.”

“Not even Waverly?”

“Especially not Waverly.” Wynonna slid sideways through the doorway around Nicole (while she still could) and was all set to retreat back to her bedroom.

“Wait,” Nicole said, “uh--Nedley called. There’s been a--someone died and he thinks it might be your kind of thing so if you wanted to go with me?”

“Right, great. Let me put on some pants.” 

Nicole looked down at her naked legs like the fact that they’d had this entire conversation while Wynonna was standing there in an old T-shirt and panties had only just occurred to her. She was nodding (approvingly) “right, good. I’ll start the car.”

\--

Injury had necessitated an adjustment to their sleeping arrangements. Not that they could be said to have any sort of sleeping arrangements. That sort of thing came of repetition and comfort; the kind of groove you got yourself into when you found yourself crawling into bed next to the same person for months that bled into years. While they could easily assign a number of months to their sexual affairs, the domestication of the relationship was still numbered in weeks. 

They had come to this so-called marital bed with preferences but those ideas hadn’t had enough time to properly mature before they were forced to make (un)reasonable adjustments.

Doc was a man that understood the nature of a consequence and he had always made a point to accept the things that he simply couldn’t change. For instance, he could very easily accept the fading yellow-brown bruises that patterned down his ribs. He could accept the ache of his bones just beneath the skin because _pain_ was just about the only consequence he’d never been able to outrun. 

Never mind what the history books said about him, his love affair with liquor and laudanum had started by necessity. There was nothing _pleasant_ about dying and even less to be looked forward to when the dying took _years_. The fact that he’d come to crave the taste, well that was neither here nor there. 

Pain was an inconvenience that Doc could live with. What he hadn’t considered, what hadn’t even realized he should have considered, was whether or not Bobo could live with it. Once you had enough time to sit in silence and really sort it out, it lost that sharp edge of shock, seeing how Robert had shown an almost instinctive lean toward kindness right from the outset. Even when he was presenting as a beast, all the posturing in the world couldn’t stop him from the terrible softness he kept well hidden beneath that monstrous fur coat.

Point was, Doc’s bruised-or-broken ribs had left him laying on his back with Bobo’s body pressed up against his side and his warm-and-soothing hand spread across the worst of the bruises while they slept. It made him sleepy in the evening when the ache was almost unbearable but it kept him prisoner in the morning when all he wanted was a smoke.

“Your heartbeat sounds different when you’re awake,” Bobo’s face was mostly buried against his side. One of his legs was pushed between Doc’s and his arm was across his belly. The hand that had been resting on his chest the night before was curled around an excess of sheets on the other side of him, like Bobo had thought Doc might fall off the bed without something holding him back. The whole pose looked about as uncomfortable as any man could get in his own bed.

“Imagine how different it would sound if we were to give a real workout,” Doc said. 

Bobo’s answer (today) was the very same growl as the day before. He lifted his head and shoulders so he could frown effectively. His hair was a disaster of peaks and long hairs falling wherever they wanted. His beard had suffered in the weeks they’d been gone, thickened and filled out across his face. “You can’t even get out of bed without bitching.”

A man could be forgiven for running his hand through his lover’s hair when it looked as silly as Bobo’s did. He scoffed at the very notion, “I am not as motivated by getting out of bed as I would be by a much needed orgasm.”

“Henry,” Bobo said with complete patience.

“Robert.”

“I’m not fucking you until your ribs heal.”

“There are other activities that are not quite so athletic that…” If Doc’s hand slid from Bobo’s hair to his jaw, and if his thumb made a point of tracing the shape of his mouth well, that was only a helpful suggestion.

Bobo shifted up onto his knees, with both his hands pushing into the bed on either side of Doc’s shoulders. He was looming over him, sleep-warm and pink-lined from sleeping so long without moving. “No.”

“I would just lay here.”

His answer was a snort and a smile that called him a liar as affectionately as any man could. Bobo dipped low enough to kiss him as chaste as church on Sunday before he lifted away again. “We’ve proven that’s not true.”

It was a lost cause even before Doc said, “well I could try harder, after all practice is what makes us perfect.”

“I like it when you can’t stay still.” Bobo lifted himself over Doc’s body to get his feet on the floor. It was barely morning now, creeping into midday if the sun was any indication of the time. Bobo stretched with a growl that made his eyes flash red and a ruffle of irritation like a pissy old bird kicked out of its nest. “Might as well go and see what other trouble they’ve gotten us into.”

Wynonna had been fairly insistent last night that he should come around to Black Badge whenever he had the time. Just guessing by the number of times she’d said it, the invitation was less of a request and more of a demand. That wasn’t a surprise seeing how they’d all made the agreement to work together.

Two weeks was a sufficient honeymoon from the unfortunate reality of the situation they found themselves in, but that didn’t mean either of them were _excited_ to be back in it. Doc held his ribs where they hurt the most as he sat up (and he didn’t make a sound while he did it, thank you very much). Bobo was pulling on his jeans like they were in some kind of race. 

It was just going to take Doc a few more minutes than that to get up the energy to follow.

\--

Jeremy hoped he didn’t look as much like a disobedient school child waiting outside the principal’s office as he felt. He was too tall, or the bench was too short, to swing his legs but he had all the other earmarks. He was wearing a fluffy coat, with a haircut his Mom approved of, clutching a bag against his chest like it was going to protect him from any laughing bullies that might have passed by. 

The sensation in his chest wasn’t far off from how it had felt then. Just sitting and _waiting_ , trying to remember all the lines he’d rehearsed about how he was going to defend (or in this case, introduce) himself. Every sound around him felt like an electric shock racing through his chest, making him turn his head one way and then another. It didn’t matter how many footsteps he heard and how many voices got close to the hallway it was never the right feet or the right voice.

Just like waiting for a principal that didn’t have time to meet with little boys who got shoved down stairs, Deputy Marshal Dolls didn’t seem like was going to _show_. So it was fitting that the only time Jeremy didn’t look to the side toward the oncoming sound of footsteps, they would turn out to belong to the man that he was looking for.

Just as fitting was the way that the man who looked exactly like his official badge photo stared down at him with a set of old keys hanging out of one hand. His lip wasn’t curled into a sneer so much as he was eying Jeremy like a sort of unexpected mold growing in your bathtub. “You’re in the wrong place,” Dolls said to him. “If you’re looking for the sheriff’s office it’s back down the hallway.”

“No,” Jeremy dumped his bag to the side and flinched as it immediately slid off and landed on the floor. He ducked to pick it up at the same time he started standing up, ending with an awkward fumble of limbs that he only barely recovered before he landed on his face. “No,” he repeated (like almost falling over didn’t just happen), “I’m supposed to be here. I’m,” he shoved his hand into his coat pocket to pull out his badge. It was just an access card sort of deal, with a picture that was almost too embarrassing to show, but it had the right logos on it. “Jeremy uh--Jeremy Chetri and I’m supposed to be here to…” 

Dolls pulled the card out of his hand to squint at it and he _was_ sneering at that point. 

“Help you?”

“Help?”

“Work with? I’m here to work with you. I mean--”

Dolls shoved the card back at him with every expectation that he would just take it and therefore no care when it fell between their hands and hit the floor. 

“They didn’t really tell me what I was here to do,” Jeremy said as he bent forward to grab the card. “I think Lucado just wanted to get rid of me? I tried to tell them that you couldn’t mix that sort of primordial ooze with--”

Dolls kicked the door with the key in the knob and it popped open like a soda can, squeaking inward and taking the keys with it. “I got it,” Dolls said, “you can just put your stuff over there.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t point in any particular direction, and that made understanding exactly what he was meant to do somewhat difficult. There were a number of empty desks that formed sort of a square in the middle of the room and none of them really looked used. It was a safe bet that he could put his bag there. 

“Did Lucado happen to tell you what we’re trying to do here in Purgatory?”

“Kill all of Wyatt Earp’s undead outlaws?” At least that was what he had _thought_ they were doing. The trouble with that assignment being that the Earp heir seemed to be friends with at least a handful of them.

“That’s right,” Dolls agreed. He yanked the keys free from the door and pushed them back into his pocket. “It’s not a lab and I don’t have time to hold your hand and teach you how to manage field work.”

Up to that moment, Jeremy had not even considered that he might be doing field work. “Of course not,” is what he said because saying anything else could only possibly make this moment more awkward. “I know how to handle myself.”

Dolls didn’t believe him for a single minute. He didn’t believe him for a single _breath_. “We’ll see about that. Once you settle in, I need you to go find Doc Holliday for me. Since he won’t answer his phone, we’ll try the old fashion way of getting a message to him. Tell him I need to see him. _Today_.”

\--

Bobo had not meant ‘trouble’ in a literal sense. (Although, given the circumstances of the day before, perhaps he should have.) The most he expected to find at the bottom of the stairs was Dowdy’s attempt at a pissy face (as if the kid was even capable of real expressions besides idiot grin and asleep). He was pleasantly surprised to find that the revenants had done what he’d _suggested_ and cleaned the bar from top to bottom. 

In fact, judging by the smell and the almost sparkling quality of the ceiling over his head, they had spent the whole of the night before taking his suggestion a little too seriously. Even the individual bottles behind the counter were glittering like they’d only just come off the assembly line. 

What Bobo had _not_ expected was Wynonna Earp, caught between impatiently charging up the stairs and standing still with her hands clenched at her sides. Even when they found themselves staring at one another from opposite ends of the last three steps, she hadn’t _really_ made up her mind if she wanted to be there or not.

“Well now,” he said, so she didn’t have to, “I didn’t expect to see you here.” This early. “If you came for a drink, the bar’s not open.” 

Stuck as they were, he couldn’t go down the stairs and she couldn’t come up them.

In fact, she didn’t seem to be able to do anything but look over at the bar with sort of an owlish look of confusion, as if she had developed a sudden and encompassing amnesia that prohibited her from remembering liquor existed. “I’m not here for a drink,” was as disappointed as any words had ever sounded.

“Henry’s unavailable at the moment, but if you want to wa--”

“I’m not here for Doc,” which might have explained the flinching uneasiness that moved from her hands to her feet. It permeated the very air around her, giving off the smell of something not-quite-right. Bobo hadn’t made it a point to memorize Wynonna’s smell, but self-preservation had a way of teaching you to recognize your enemy by any means necessary. Earps all smelled the same (give or take a few hygiene products) but-- “There’s been a murder. I mean, we think it’s a murder--No, we don’t _think_ … Someone is dead and Nedley thinks it might be revenant business. So,” dragged out like there was only one logical conclusion.

“So?” Bobo repeated.

“So,” Wynonna repeated, with force, “will you come with us and look at it and tell us if it reminds you of anyone?” Every word was irritated. Every single syllable was an accusation against him. As if he should have just _known_ and she shouldn’t have had to _ask_. 

Fair was fair, because for all that Wynonna didn’t know how to ask graciously, Bobo didn’t know how to agree graciously. Rather than attempting he just grunted a noise that he assumed would convey ‘yes’ and brushed past her at the bottom of the stairs, “Let me grab my coat.”

\--

Nicole wasn’t squeamish but she _was_ human.

Nobody human could stand at the edge of a scene like this and feel _nothing_. Whether it was the sense of dread that sank down her throat like a stone, gathering up strings of ragged flesh as it went, growing tighter and hotter and harder to swallow or the liquid squeeze of her gut churning over on itself, caught between vomit and screaming. 

There were plenty of things to feel and none of them felt good.

“At least it’s too cold to smell,” Nedley said from the side, “I hate it when there’s a smell.”

The cold had saved them from the smell, and it had preserved a few gruesome details of the scene that they might have otherwise missed, but it had not done the victim any favors. Just judging by how dark her feet had gotten, she had carried herself here. 

There were no human tracks in the snow in either direction. No sense of which way she had come from, out of the treeline or off the highway. That would have to be determined by guesswork. For instance, one might extrapolate that the area of kicked up snow could have been where the victim discarded the bits of her own face and neck that had been cut away.

Certainly, predators had been drawn out of the woods by the prospect of fresh meat but they hadn’t so much as nibbled at her. Whether they were put off by the ice forming across her skin or the purpled bloat of her body filling up with it’s own gasses couldn’t be determined. Perhaps they’d sniffed at the bloody foam that had oozed out of the holes in her cheeks, how it stuck to her teeth and nose. They could have been put off by the milkiness of it still erupting from her gaping mouth before it froze over.

“Have you ever…” Nicole started.

“It's better not to ask things like that. You just gotta,” Nedley motioned his hand forward, at the scene before them, “focus on what you see.”

That was the core of the problem. Nicole couldn’t even begin to fully understand what she was looking at. She couldn’t get around the way the victim’s hands had curled how they had, how perfect her manicure was. How her hair had been blown to the side by vehicles racing past on the highway. How she was stripped down to her underclothes, and how her panties match her bra. How bright and pink they were against the unrelenting white of the snow. 

“Take it one breath at a time,” Nedley said at her side, “I’ll take the photos, you write down what you see.”

She’d barely opened her notebook to start her notes when Wynonna pulled to a stop a matter of feet behind them. Nicole looked back at her if only to give herself a moment to look at anything else. 

Intellectually, Nicole understood that Bobo was a demon, or what passed for one in Purgatory. Theoretically she understood that he’d done plenty of bad. 

But _practically_ , the only things she had ever seen him do had been in self-defense. He had been on their side since she’d finally been brought in on the secret that there were sides. While Wynonna and Waverly were working through the sort of trauma that would take a lifetime to get over, Nicole was sighing in something like _relief_. 

Wynonna was brought to a halt, an arm’s length behind Nicole. Even when she’d been here earlier, she hadn’t made it any closer. (And why would she even try, when she had no training in crime scenes?) Bobo didn’t so much as falter in his step, crossing the distance between the truck and the body. He was polite enough to hover just out of sight while Nedley took the last of his photos.

“Go on,” Nedley said, “looks like one of yours anyway.”

“Not mine,” Bobo said as he swept the coat back behind him and crouched lower. His arms were leaning across his knees as he dipped forward to draw in a lungful of the air around the corpse. His mouth twitched down to a grimace.

He shifted his weight back onto his heels as he rose back to standing. Once he was at his full height, he looked over at her, not Nedley, “where’s the knife?”

“Knife?” Nedley repeated.

Bobo wasn’t listening, he turned in a circle with a swish of his coat. It dragged through the snow as he followed the line of predator tracks back toward the treeline. Halfway there he ducked low enough to dig his hand into the snow. The knife he brought back was hardly more than a paring knife, didn’t look like it could do more than peel potatoes. “Knife,” he said like it was _necessary_. And then he lifted it to his mouth.

“Oh fuck,” Wynonna gasped behind her, “don’t…” sounded just about helpless.

But Bobo ran his tongue across the blade. His face pinched at the taste and he turned his face to spit. “Remind me, which one of you tortured Vinnie?” He seemed to think his part was finished, at least judging by how he dropped the knife on Nicole’s notebook as he went past her.

“Vinnie the Vulture?” Wynonna didn’t look _sorry_ staring back into the pointed smile on Bobo’s face. “I wouldn’t call it _torture_. I just made some...suggestions...with a fish hook.”

If anything, Bobo was _impressed_. “Tell me, _how_ did you come to find out about Vinnie?”

Wynonna’s arms were crossed over her chest as she shifted on her feet so she was staring back up at Bobo. The height difference was exaggerated by the dip Wynonna was standing in, giving the impression that she was nothing but a kid facing a bully. And she said, “I don’t remember.”

Bobo’s arms went behind his back, he tipped forward so he was easing himself into Wynonna’s space. His voice was so low it was barely audible when he said, “try to remember.”

“For fucks sake,” Nedley cut in. “Does this have something to do with who killed this woman? Do we _have_ to have the dramatics?”

Bobo snorted. He straightened his back. That smile on his face was anything but conciliatory; it didn’t matter how helpful he tried to make himself sound, every word was as good as a threat. “Your corpse was the work of Vinnie’s beloved brother Bubba--and don’t let the _funny name_ fool you. He’s got a limitless imagination. Comes up with all kinds of poisons, makes people do _crazy_ things like cut off their own faces.” And he turned back to look at Wynonna, “and he’ll be coming for whoever sold out his brother.”

Wynonna’s jaw was clenched tight, it moved like it was breaking when she said, “Doc told me where to find him.”

\--

Doc did not believe that his intentions were so well hidden they couldn’t be easily understood. He’d marinated in a wonderfully hot shower, meandered through the process of getting dressed and took a few minutes to scroll through some useless headlines on his phone. By the time he finally found his way down the stairs, the bar was _technically_ open but the number of patrons were slim. 

There were the usual couple of old men in the booths by the windows, turning pages in their newspapers and enjoying the ambiance of the (startlingly clean) bar. Waverly was at the bar itself, rubbing a rag across the already clean counter, frowning out the windows with all of her considerable concentration. 

That was just as well because Doc had been cornered the night before by Wynonna who had seemed far happier than she had ever seemed before to see him. In fact, her insistence on taking up his time had bordered on manic the night before. He only wanted to get a drink to start his day.

Alone.

By himself.

Without other people.

That _should_ have been easy to understand given how he had chosen the table as far away from any other person as he could get it. He had not approached Waverly to ask for a glass or drink, but retrieved both himself. He did not smile. He did not nod. He did not give any indication that he was in want of any manner of acknowledgement. 

And still, Waverly invited herself across the room and right up to the table. She rested one of her hands on the back of the empty chair across from him and the other on her hip. “Well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” didn’t come across as fully genuine as one might have thought it would. That didn’t seem to matter much as she shifted from pleasantries to the real reason she had moseyed over to interrupt his attempt at a quiet drink. “So, is Bobo still up there? In your room, I mean?”

“He is not.” Doc unscrewed the lid of the whiskey and pulled his glass closer so he could pour a generous helping for himself.

Waverly’s mouth pulled down at the edges as she watched him set the bottle down without closing it. Rather than address her disapproval, she continued on with: “So, he went out? Any idea when he’ll be back? Or... _where_ he went?”

This was not a conversation that Doc wanted to have. Up until that moment he was not aware that Bobo was not in the bar. He had never been the sort of man that felt like he was owed his lover’s exact coordinates at every moment. Doc enjoyed his drink before he thought of an answer worth sharing. 

Waverly seemed to find this more irritating than the simple insult of trying to have a drink by himself. She pulled the bottle back toward her side of the table as her sneaky fingers grabbed the cap. It was a childish gesture that was a fitting response to his own. 

They regarded one another.

“I do not have an idea as to Bobo’s location nor the time he might return.” 

As absorbed as they were in staring defiantly at one another, neither of them had seen Jeremy approach until he cleared his throat like a smallish critter. The sound was no louder than a baby’s sneeze and still it made Waverly flinch. Her jerk of surprise made Jeremy’s eyes widen in surprise. 

The pair of them opened their mouths at the same time, the pair of voices mixing up into one singular polite apology. 

And embarrassed as they were to both apologize they were stumbling over words like:

“Oh no you don’t have to--”

“I didn’t mean to--”

“I wasn’t paying attention--”

This was not a conversation that Doc needed to or wanted to participate in so he slid out of his seat with every intention of retrieving his coat and going about his business for the day. He couldn’t have made it more than a few steps before he became aware of the patter of footsteps following after him. 

Doc continued to the bar where he retrieved his coat where it had been shoved under the counter. When he straightened up again (with a wince at the pinch in his ribs), he found Jeremy standing on the opposite side of the bar with the same sweetly adoring smile he’d had the last time they’d met. 

“Hi,” was positively dripping with hope, “Mr. Holliday.” (That was a name that just didn’t sound right to anyone who said it.) “Nice to see you again. I hope I-- I’m sorry about last time. About, you know… Vomiting. Near you.”

“Think nothing of it,” Doc assured him. He slid his arms into his coat while Jeremy continued to gaze at him with an almost dreamy softness to his eyes. “I’ve already forgotten.”

“Yeah, good,” Jeremy whispered. 

It felt like the conversation was concluded, and so Doc grabbed his hat and fixed it upon his head. It wasn’t until he started on his way back around the bar that Jeremy seemed to remember he had been sent for a reason.

“Oh wait,” he said as he spun around to face him on his way to the door. “Uh, Deputy Marshal Dolls wants to-- He said he _needs_ to see you and I’m supposed to make sure you come over to Black Badge.”

Doc had been ignoring the messages filling up his phone from Dolls and he had been doing it purposefully. He missed the days that they had remained politely at odds with one another. They had ignored one another except when there were no other options and that had suited both of them just fine. This new Dolls seemed entirely too comfortable with personal communication. 

Still, Jeremy couldn’t have forced so much as a mouse to eat a piece of cheese. What was more telling was how he was _aware_ of it. 

“With all due respect to yourself,” Doc said, “you may tell Deputy Marshal Dolls to go fuck himself.” He tipped his hat to the boy’s struck-dumb face and continued on his way to the door.

\--

Wynonna could have blamed the tightening knot of hunger in her gut on pregnancy, (and she would have felt incrementally better about herself) but it was just as likely that not even a gruesome crime scene and the discovery of a brand new revenant threat was enough to diminish her appetite. She’d been fantasizing about sweet and savory breakfast treats since she’d slammed the door of her truck closed behind her.

Waffles, in particular, sounded perfect. Crispy, warm, well-buttered, syrup-soaked waffles. Maybe some sausage patties. Maybe some links. She could go for some ham too. 

Maybe it was her fucked up coping mechanisms or maybe it was it’s own type of survival instinct, letting herself into the Sheriff’s office so-called break room to steal stale doughnuts with the memory of a frozen corpse still hanging just behind your eyes. Regardless of the horror of the day (and it had been a _horror_ ) a woman had to eat. 

Even stale and dry as they were, the doughnuts were _something_ to fill what felt like a cavernous hunger expanding in her gut. (Or maybe whatever was growing in there was just as hungry as she was. Didn’t all the sitcoms say something about eating for two?) She’d walked away from a crime scene when the man with the snow shovels showed up. It was enough to see the frozen stiff flaps of flesh hanging open around the woman’s jaw without having to deal with the auditory nightmare of listening to men digging a body out of the snow.

Bobo had given her a name and Dolls or not, it was her unfortunate duty to find the revenant that belonged to the name. The only place she could think to start were the stacks of Waverly’s well organized research. 

(Which, let's be real, Wynonna should already have read through. Only she was _working_ on it and Waves was nothing if not pedantic.) 

She had one doughnut in her hand and one clenched in her teeth when she twisted the knob and shoved open the door of BBD offices. She’d expected to find more of the same, slow settling dust and long-quiet shadows. The emptiness that had taken over the space once Dolls had decided he needed to take a little vacation with absolutely no warning.

Whatever, it wasn’t the first time Dolls had disappeared.

What Wynonna had not _expected_ to find was the stacks of books and files and papers. She _hadn’t_ expected to find Jeremy sitting in one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs behind a tall desk, face resting against his hand as he stared woefully down at the research before him. He looked, from his soft curls to his sour frown, like a child sent to detention _again_. He glanced up at her without moving his head, as soon as he focused on her his eyes moved, like pointing over his shoulder at Dolls’ office door standing wide open.

There was a squealing file cabinet begging for mercy followed by the slap of it being roughly forced shut. Not that she wanted to, but even if she had wanted to, there wasn’t enough time to slide back through the open door and pretend like she had never walked in before Dolls came through the doorway. His time away had returned him to the most charming version of himself, that straight-backed, unsmiling hardass. 

Even before he said _anything_ , she could hear him.

“You steal those from the breakroom?” Only a man with a massive stick up his ass could make taking leftover-from-yesterday doughnuts sound like a prosecutable crime. “You know what,” he slapped the folder in his hand shut before she could even answer, “doesn’t matter. It’s good you’re here.” He dropped the stack of files he was holding on the desk.

Wynonna pulled the doughnut out of her mouth as she rolled the bite into the hollow of her cheek, “is it?”

Jeremy didn’t move an inch but all the same he looked like he was on the verge of sliding off the chair and under the desk. (Hell, she didn’t know the guy, that might just be his face.) 

“Yes. I need someone that knows how to talk to Doc, someone that he won’t ignore.” Dolls looked down at Jeremy for a fraction of the second and then up again at her.

This was not a situation that Wynonna wanted to be in the middle of. This was a full-on classic no-win situation. Doc was his own man, beholden to no sense of duty or law. He wasn’t sworn in as a deputy and he had offered no actual allegiance to anyone (as far as Wynonna knew) but all the same Bobo was most definitely loyal to him. 

Dolls was a man that had to be in charge at all times. Every ounce of him, standing there in front of her now, was made up of the ideal of an alpha male. From the soldier stance to the arms looped behind his back, to the uptilt of his chin just waiting for her to ask him for orders. If it wasn’t so infuriating it would have been laughable.

And really, that sort of thing had always been unnecessary. Doc might be a pain in the ass, and he might be like a splinter stuck under your thumb nail, but what he wasn’t was interested in proving he had the biggest dick in the group. 

“Fine, _fine_ , what do you need Doc for?” She dropped the doughnuts in the trash (and Dolls frowned exactly how he’d frowned at her having them to start with). “Come on, what, does he have your diary, what is it?”

“We need him to come in.”

There were a lot of things that they needed: a plate of fresh waffles drowning in syrup, a new coffee maker, a raise, a big ass box of bullets and chairs that didn’t hurt your ass to sit in. What they _didn’t_ need was to drag Doc back into BBD headquarters against his will. 

“ _Why_?” she asked.

“We need a game plan for how we’re going to correspond,” (and he said this with the utmost disdain), “with the revenants.”

Obviously Dolls had hit his head on his little vacay away from the office because there was no other way he would have forgotten about Howard’s so-called introductory packet. Or the power point. _God_ , the power point. “A game plan?” she repeated, “we already have one.”

“No,” was it’s own paragraph, full stop. “ _They_ have a game plan. We need information about how their group is organized, how solid Bobo’s lead is. Any secrets or special powers that they might have been keeping from us.”

“What, you think Howard’s hiding something? Dowdy? It would be a miracle to get them to _shut up_. If you want to ask them something about the _organization_ , if you can call it that, why not just ask?”

Dolls didn’t roll his eyes because that was too crass. No, he just looked at her like he felt sorry for how naive she was. “Oh, I plan to. That’s what I need Doc for. I don’t like the guy but he’s spent the most time with the revenants out of anybody. I want to find out what he knows. The revenants’ tells, their personal weaknesses, things that can give us an advantage.”

“ _Again_ , why do we need that?”

“They’re _demons_ , Wynonna.”

That hadn’t seemed to matter when it benefited them. “Where is this coming from?”

“Coming from?” Dolls repeated, like it was the most outrageous thing he’d ever heard, “that’s my job, Wynonna. If they want to work with us in good faith, that’s fine. They can help us end the curse, but at the end of the day they are _demons_ and just because they say they’re going to help doesn’t mean that they are.”

There was simply no point in arguing with a belligerent man. Wynonna clenched her teeth behind her stretched-out smile, cycling through every variation of the end of this conversation in her head. There was no version where Dolls admitted that everything he just said was fucking stupid and no version where she agreed with him.

Since they found themselves at an impasse, and since she was hungry, and tired, and fucking fed up in general, she went with the only version she found herself capable of in that moment. 

“I don’t know what bug crawled up your ass while you were out having a pity party for your wounded pride or whatever the hell it was that made you disappear with _no warning_ and not even for the _first time_ and I don’t honestly give a shit. I’m about sick and fucking _tired_ of being told what to do. First Ward, and then parole officers and now _you_. Well here’s the thing _I_ am the one with the big ass gun that sends demons back to hell. _I_ am the one with the family curse that keeps me and every other person in my family line tied to these _demons_. And that means that _I_ get to decide who is on my fucking side and who isn’t. And I’ve got to make that call based on who is going to help me stay alive long enough to break this fucking curse.”

Dolls opened his mouth like he had nothing but protests.

“Oh!” Wynonna said from a half-turn toward the door, “by the way, while you were here doing whatever bitchy shit you’ve been up to this morning, I and that untrustworthy _demon_ you want to interrogate Doc about were out at a crime scene. Which you would have known if you had _been_ here.”

“He killed your family, Wynonna.”

It was like being punched in the gut. The same as it had always been with men who thought they knew better than her. All the therapists and cops and judges and foster homes and parole officers, they all looked at her and they all thought the same thing. That she was too fundamentally broken to know the truth when she saw it. 

The last time she’d pulled the deputy badge off her belt in this building, she’d been three foot away from this same unrepentant face, with her heart beating through her chest because it felt like it was breaking into pieces. The last time she’d been beaten raw and betrayed; last time her voice had cracked because it _hurt_.

This time the tears in her eyes were all anger and the only sound that cracked was the metal striking the wood top of the desk just to Dolls’ right. The only face that registered any sense of surprise was _his_. Because he’d made his stand and he hadn’t expected how she smirked back in his stupid face.

He hadn’t expected how she said, “go fuck yourself,” like _I don’t need you_. 

It was his voice that changed (not hers) and his footsteps that shuffled after her as she turned to leave. He was saying, “ _Wynonna_ ,” because she was being unreasonable. But he didn’t follow her through the door when she slammed it behind her.

\--

Bobo had accepted the ride from Wynonna from Purgatory to the crime scene and he was sure she would have given him a ride back. But the two weeks he’d spent in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees and snow, where the loudest sound was the cracking of the logs in the fire and the closest person was Henry had left him with a craving for _space_. For _quiet_. For the clean taste of the bitter cold that slid over his tongue and teeth when he pulled a breath in. 

Walking spared whatever small talk might have tried to fill the limited space of Wynonna’s truck. It avoided all the questions about how many other revenants were left alive (a question he couldn’t even begin to answer) and what their intentions might be. Questions about whether or not Bubba had been in his employ (and he had) and for how long and what he’d done in that time.

Those were the sort of questions that had answers nobody wanted to hear. 

He’d walked to buy himself time to create a narrative that was palatable to anyone that wanted to know just enough of the truth to be able to sleep at night. Bobo was back in town before he’d worked out exactly how best to salvage a situation that was almost certainly going to go to shit. Even if they found Bubba (a task that was not nearly as easy as it sounded) before anyone else died, the fact remained that a woman had died.

It was all well and good when the demons were killing to protect you and another when former associates started dropping bodies for the hell of it.

Dowdy was standing outside the bar, hunched over with his hands shoved into his coat pockets. There was nothing casual about the way he was watching the street, nothing at all accidental about how he was standing there. No, he was saying, “we heard what happened, boss. Lawrence said last he’d seen Bubba he was holed up in that abandoned school at the edge of town. The boys are out there looking for him but nobody’s called.”

“Keep looking, Bubba’s an insect, he’ll hide anywhere.” Bobo had every intention of walking right past because he _needed_ to see Henry. It had started like an itch, blossoming out of the center of his chest. It was covering his skin like a rash, taking over every thought not preoccupied with creating his story. His hand was on the door, his foot was across the threshold, before Dowdy said:

“He’s not in there.” Dowdy was cursed with an idiot’s face but he was smart enough to know when to run. He stayed still only long enough to be sure he’d been heard before he took off at top speed, away from the bar and toward the end of town where the abandoned school stood. 

The doors themselves trembled when the hinges jostled in place. He kicked open the second set of doors with more force than he intended to find the bar was full of confused faces eying their glasses and tables and chairs, trying to figure out how everything had started to shiver in place. 

Some man in the far corner was muttering about earthquakes, but Waverly was looking at him from behind the bar with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. As soon as she saw him, the edge of worry eased in her face but the surprise turned her cheeks pink. “There you are,” she said.

“Henry’s not here?”

“Oh, no he left--” 

“When?”

“An hour ago? Maybe more?”

It wouldn’t help anyone to ask if Henry had said where he was going because he wouldn’t have. Bobo had already tried to convince Henry to keep himself safe once and he’d seen exactly what happened when you pushed Doc fucking Holliday to do something. “Hui?”

“He’s in the office,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

The answer was no, but Bobo said, “we’ll handle it.”

\--

Jeremy didn’t know why he was there. Both in the immediate sense, in the morgue and in the broader sense, in Purgatory at all. Lucado hadn’t told him much, and it was probably a punishment for that explosion (that wasn’t his fault) but he had _degrees_. He was meant to be in research.

He was meant to be in development.

He was not meant to be dragged from one standoff to another.

This standoff involved the thawing body of a murder victim, slowly easing into decomposition as the meltwater overflowed the edges of the metal table and landed on the ugly tile floor. The smell of the thawing ice was turning acidic in the air, filling up with the sort of stink that would have been enough to turn a man’s stomach if any man in this particular room had been capable of _noticing_.

Nedley (the sheriff) hadn’t been the one to set it off, but he had been the one that spoke first. He’d said, “where’ve you been?”

Dolls had waved a hand like that sort of question was beneath him. He’d grabbed up the clipboard nearest the body like it held the answers he wasn’t going to lower himself to ask, and when he found it filled with blank forms he slapped it down again. “Where’s the autopsy information?”

“Autopsy?” had been Nicole cough-laughing. 

“Standard protocol in murder investigations.” (Dolls)

Nedley looked like and sounded like someone’s long suffering father, raising his hand to defuse a tense situation. “Hold on, slow down. We just transported the body from the crime scene and our medical examiner’s not due for another hour. We’ll have the autopsy as soon as we can.”

“Ridiculous.”

Nicole’s stance shifted. Jeremy didn’t know much about her, but he’d watched her be endlessly berated by a woman over a missing pig and she hadn’t so much as showed a flinch of stress. But here she was shifting her weight like she was going to have to launch herself forward to tackle a man to the ground. “Excuse me?” 

“Is there anything you do know?”

Jeremy took the precaution of taking a few steps to the side. It took him out of range of just about any possible swinging elbows or full-body tackles. For all that he’d be the first to admit that he had no personal stakes in the matter, and that he was missing just about all the facts, he couldn’t help but inch himself closer to the side that stood opposite Dolls. 

“Slow down,” Nedley repeated. “Now, just take a breath. Where’s Wynonna?”

“Wynonna’s no longer part of Black Badge?”

And that, and how dismissively Dolls said it, well that was what _really_ started the shouting.

“What?” Nicole asked, “since when?”

“She turned in her badge.”

That wasn’t exactly what happened. Or rather, that was what happened if you didn’t care about context.

Nedley had been across the room, because the thickening smell of the body wasn’t as strong when you moved farther away from it. (And really, one of them should wheel the corpse into the cold room instead of leaving it out to keep melting away their evidence.) He didn’t move between Nicole and Dolls but he did put himself to the side of the pair. 

“She turned it in or you asked for it?” Nicole asked.

“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Deputy Haught.”

“But you do,” and Nedley did put himself in front of Dolls then, “have to answer to me. Now I played along with all your demands and I gave you plenty of office space. I've let you look at my cases when I thought they were something that you were better suited to handle but this is my investigation and I haven’t asked you to get involved.”

The quiet that followed was the like span of seconds between a flash of lightning and the sound of thunder. Jeremy was holding his breath and he couldn’t even really figure out why, between the smell and the raised voices and the look on Dolls’ face it just seemed like he should.

Dolls _laughed_ , he _laughed_ like he’d heard the best joke of his life. Like the man standing in front of him _was_ a joke. “Alright, you think you can handle this? You handle it.” Dolls left the way he’d come in, all aggression and fury, sweeping out like a natural disaster leaving nothing but silence in his wake.

Jeremy was left standing to the side, caught at the end of another awkward situation, he didn’t even know why he was opening his mouth (except that Nicole had been nice to him, and because Wynonna had been nicer). “Wynonna quit. They had a fight and she left her badge.”

“Gee, I wonder what they were fighting about,” Nicole scoffed. 

“Doc.”

Nedley let out a breath that sounded exactly like a curse. He pulled his hat off and ran his finger through his hair and put the hat back on. “Who are you?”

“I’m Jeremy. Jeremy Chetri. Black Badge sent me here to work--I’m usually in research.” He didn’t want to look at the corpse again, but it was still melting out in the open. 

“You better go before he comes back to get you,” Nedley said. “Come on, we’ll move this body into the cooler before it loses any more water.”

\--

Even if Wynonna was capable of moving quietly (and he wasn’t sure that she really _was_ ) Bobo sincerely doubted doing so would have occurred to her to try. No, the Earps in general weren’t a family known for their subtlety when bravado would do. Shuffling behind Wynonna’s fast-moving-feet was her little sister’s hesitant tiptoeing and Waverly’s voice singing down the short hall and into the open door of the office. 

“...I just don’t know that we’re supposed to go back--oh, ok, you’re just--”

That left him with two Earp sisters (give or take) standing in his doorway. Waverly had taken whatever excuse brought her back to the office and now that she was here (and the door was unlocked) she invited herself to take notice of the old maps of Purgatory hanging on the walls. She was _delighted_ as she eased right up next to Hui to inspect the one nearest the door.

“Wynonna,” Bobo said.

“Bobo,” was her answer.

It wasn’t quiet in the room, exactly, not with Waverly making sounds and mumbling things under her breath. He would have let her see the maps eventually, just maybe not when she was the only waitress in the bar. Wynonna was agitated from the top of her snow-damp hair to the bottom of her furry boots and it shot through her body like a bit of static electricity stinging everywhere it landed.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” He dropped the pen he’d been holding. “Did your sheriff find another body.”

“Nope.” she looked to the side and then back at him, “so, where is he? Back at the-- Back there it seemed like you knew a lot about this Bubba guy.”

“ _Knew_ ,” was the important part, “past tense.”

Wynonna rolled her eyes so hard it shook her hair. That irritation rippled down her spine so she set her feet like they were about to _fight_. “I am having a shitty fucking day and I don’t need _you_ arguing verb tenses at me. Do you have an idea of where this bastard is or am I going to have to pick a direction and drive until I find the first shitty building I find. I assume that’s where he’ll be.”

Waverly stopped cooing at the map to look over at her sister. She was working up to full sympathetic little sister worry that wouldn’t have done anything to help. 

“Where’s your back up?” Dolls was a man who gave off a smell that was distinctive enough that you could catch the scent of it as long as it was anywhere in the same building with you. There wasn’t so much as a whiff of that stink, not in the bar and not on Wynonna herself. 

Wynonna’s hand slapped against the gun on her hip in time with, “right here. All the backup I need.”

Ward hadn’t been his favorite Earp (although he couldn’t quite figure out which one was. Josiah hadn’t shot him and Edwin had just been doing what he thought was the right thing) but he had been the easiest to control. Cowards were always willing to make deals with whoever they thought was going to keep them alive. 

Wynonna was nothing like her Dad, more like a raw wound than a coward. Standing there now, body cocked like a loaded gun and her stare locked with his, unflinching and unafraid, she might as well have been a toddler with bloody knees. 

“I don’t know where he _is_ , but I know places he’s _been_ ,” Bobo said finally. “I can show you.”

“You could _tell_ me.”

He could. He could have drawn her a map and sent her on her way. Certainly the thought crossed his mind, and it wasn’t because he didn’t like her (as much as natural enemies could like one another) but because it was _easier_ to let her go alone. To say that Henry wouldn’t like knowing she’d run off to find a man like Bubba by herself would be an understatement.

Impulse thinking like that had already gotten enough Earps killed.

“I’m not very good at directions.” 

They both knew it was a lie. Hui knew it was a lie. Waverly knew it was a lie. 

But Wynonna sighed, put her hands up in defeat, “ _fine_. Get your coat, I’ll be in the truck.”

\--

They didn’t make it anywhere. 

Or--

They made it _somewhere_ , like sixteen feet past the scene of the fucking crime. They made it out of town and back onto the highway with the overheated air growing stagnant and thick in the cab of the truck. They made it far enough for the snow on Bobo’s coat to melt through the fur. Far enough for the smell of his breath to tinge the air with old slow burning coals. 

They made it just far enough for Wynonna to jerk the wheel of the truck, for that scream that she’d been swallowing since she’d thrown her badge on the desk to creep up her throat. Far enough that when she kicked the door open, there was nobody at all but Bobo himself to hear her scream. 

Sixteen feet past where _another_ body had fallen.

Sixteen feet from further proof that it didn’t matter how much she had _done_ there was still more to do. That the task before her was fucking impossible. That she was carrying a curse that had started with Wyatt and fucked everyone that came after him. Wyatt had died in peace, not a fucking worry in the fucking world, growing old and going out on his own time. 

The rest of them lived in fear.

They died messy, bloody and fucking _horrible_.

Another body to drive home the point that she was _never_ going to be safe. That this baby growing in her gut was going to inherit whatever Wynonna couldn’t finish. Oh hell, _oh_ hell, oh _hell--_

Bobo had gotten out of the truck while she was screaming. Wynonna had always wondered how he’d gotten to Waverly. How he’d gotten a little girl raised up with the principle of trust nobody to believe in a man that appeared out of nowhere and asked her to bury things in the garden. But that look on his face, just there, as he crossed at the front of the truck, as he looked at her like he _cared_.

Oh fuck, that must have been how he looked at Waverly when she was starving for the affection that Ward couldn’t or _wouldn’t_ give. The sort of look that said it understood the hell you’d been through, and it _cared_. 

It was her and him and a truck by the side of the highway. Caught in a sluggish snow, breathing hard and fast filling up the space with shimmering white clouds in front of their mouths. He was going to say _something_. He was going to ask _what she was doing_. 

Wynonna didn’t know half of what she was going to do until she found her hands shoving at his shoulders. Until it was every ounce of strength in her body against the stubborn unmoving mass of his. She was grinding out, “why weren’t you there! Why wasn’t it you! It was your fucking deal. It was your fucking plan!” 

He didn’t move but dig his boots into the snow and lean into the force of her fingers digging through the fur of his coat and into the flesh beneath. The sound of his mouth opening was so close she thought she could hear him inhale over the start of a word she didn’t want to hear. 

Dolls was a bastard and Doc was half-gone-all-the-time but between them they’d managed to show her how to set her feet to throw a punch that mattered. She was stronger now than she’d ever been in all her life, whether that was the Earp curse or a matter of training didn’t matter. Her fist connected with Bobo’s face in the blistering cold and the force of it was enough to make him move. 

He stumbled backward and she followed after him, words over words flowing out her mouth, saying things like, “you coward! Why weren’t you there? If it mattered so much, if he was going to go willingly, if he was going to help you break the curse why the fuck weren’t you there? Why did you send them! Why did you send them to the homestead! You could have taken him anywhere!”

Her life didn’t have to go like it did.

She didn’t have to pull the trigger that killed her father. 

She didn’t have to live with the sound of Willa’s screams as the only clear memory of her sister. She’d forgotten Willa’s smile and her eyes, and the sound of her voice. She’d forgotten how her arms felt wrapped around Wynonna when they were hiding under the covers to stay up late. 

But she remembered Willa’s screams, she remembered how desperate and frightened she’d been, shouting Daddy and help me as the sound drifted further and further away. 

Every shout was a strike of fists, beating against Bobo’s face and his shoulders and his chest. He slipped at the edge of the highway, landed on his knees in the banked up snow. She hit him with his head ducked low and his arms raised like it mattered that he protected himself. 

“Why?” she screamed at him and she kicked him, as low as he was, right in the chest. It knocked him back in the snow. There she stood, towering over him, feet slipping on the same slope that had knocked him down. There were tears in her eyes, fresh and hot leaving cold wet streaks down her face. Her throat was scoured raw and her voice was strangled. “It was never supposed to be me! Do you understand that? _You_ did this to me, to my family!”

Bobo rolled back up to sitting. There was thick dark blood on his face, oozing out of his nose and mouth. That smile that stretched across his cheeks was anything but _cowed_. No, this was the very same monster that she’d come face to face with when she’d walked back into Purgatory. This was a proper demon, stripped of all his human politeness. And he went from sitting to standing so quick she couldn’t tell how he’d done it. But his arms dipping back and his shoulders rolling to pull the coat off was so deliberate it made her heartbeat quicken in her chest. 

His voice was rolling, and deep, and _taunting_. Oozing like that ugly revenant blood, “is that all you’ve got, Wynonna?” He dropped the coat to the side, like a _challenge_.

She pulled Peacemaker out of its holster, saw how his eyes were tracking it as she slid the long barrel into a gap in the bumper. Wynonna didn’t have a single idea what the hell she was doing, but that didn’t change how _satisfying_ it was to throw her body into his, to knock him down again. She followed after him, balled up fists and nothing but all the white-hot-rage that she couldn’t get out.

Alcohol didn’t touch it.

Fucking didn’t make a difference.

Prison and therapists and bad boys and criminals didn’t come close to making it _bearable_.

Killing the bastards that attacked her home had made it burn as hot as a goddamn sun in her chest, and she’d thought (she’d really _thought_ ) that there was hope that sending the last one back would bring her any kind of peace.

But she’d walked through a field of snow, in the aftermath of a bloodbath, and she’d sent demon after demon to hell and all the while she’d be caught up in a void of feeling. She’d been breathing and moving and hardly living, thinking nothing about nothing because it didn’t matter how many times she felt that brush of hellfire pushing back against her cheeks it didn’t change _anything_.

The wet-red-mess of Bobo’s face wasn’t going to change it.

Just there, as she shoved her hands against his heaving chest to lift herself back to standing, as she took her time about kicking him. As she felt the resistance and give of his ribs, and heard how his voice went _high_ and _thin_ when the bones snapped, that felt something like _relief_.

Until it didn’t.

Until Bobo was curled so tight into a ball that she’d have to move behind him to keep kicking. Until exhaustion knocked her back. She landed on her ass in the snow, drenched in sweat, breathing so hard it felt like ice crystals were forming in her lungs.

His blood was in the snow.

She was sitting in her very own crime scene, arms across her bent knees, watching how Bobo uncurled long and slow. His body turned into the pink-brown snow, finding relief from the cold that had soaked through his clothes. When he was laid out on his gut, with his forehead pressed into his curled fist, he said, “we’re demons. _I’m_ a demon.”

They all were what they were. Bobo was a demon and Wynonna was a demon killer. They were stuck forever, and _ever_ , in this very same circle. Running and fighting and killing because Wyatt God Damn Earp hadn’t had the balls to come back and fix what he’d fucking broken.

Bobo’s knees shifted, pulled up under his body. His free arm wrapped around his chest, clutched at the parts she’d felt crack and splinter. He looked at her, sweat-pink and bloody, when he said, “I don’t want to go back to hell.”

They couldn’t go back. Neither Bobo nor her could change a fucking thing that had already happened. They could only move forward or die standing still. She wiped her hand across her face, sniffled the snot that was dripping out of her nose. 

Wynonna was nodding along when she said, “we end this curse. You and me, swear it. The curse stops with us.” She leaned forward with her hand sticking out, thinking that it would have served her right if he slapped it away. 

But Bobo watched her hand waver in the air a minute before he shifted his weight so he could meet her in the middle. 

\--

It was a fitting end to a shit day to be sent out to check on a suspicious amount of smoke. It was on the way to the homestead, Nedley had said, you’ll be headed that way anyway. Back to where Waverly would wrap her arms around Nicole’s body and kiss her so softly and sweetly that everything would seem like it would be perfectly fine.

(And it was, until Waverly stole the blankets again.)

Still, dragging her tired ass through snow that went higher than her ankles and soaked through her uniform pants wasn’t how she wanted to end her day. It hadn’t seemed like it would take that long to get from the road to the smell of smoke but every step she took felt like two. If any part of her was capable of shirking her duty she might just have turned back around and reported everything was fine-just-fine here.

But no, she kept walking.

And walking.

Until she passed a skinny line of trees that was the last defense between her and the source of the smoke. She had expected a fire, sure. You couldn’t have smoke without a fire. But she hadn’t expected such a fire. She hadn’t expected a lawn chair and stump-turned-end table. She certainly hadn’t expected to find Doc lounging in said chair, looking impossibly warm despite the biting chill of the air. He had his knife resting across his thighs and a bottle of liquor halfway between the arm of the lawn chair and his mouth. 

“Officer Haught,” he said.

It had been a _shit_ day. From waking up cold, to the frozen corpse, to new revenants, to Dolls, to Waverly’s worried phone calls to _this_. “Doc,” she said.

“What manner of business has brought you so far from the road in these terrible conditions?” He moved the bottle away from his mouth so it was resting on the chair arm, and maybe just so she’d feel comfortable he moved his other hand away from the knife.

Anyone smart would know not to get comfortable in a secluded place when it was only themselves and Doc Holliday and only one of them had a knife worth anything. But she was tired and she was cold. 

“Someone saw the smoke, I got sent to check it out.” She moved forward with her finger pointing at the bottle like a warning, and just to be polite she said, “can I have a drink?” But she wasn’t interested in permission as much as she was interested in the drink. 

Even as cold as it was, the liquor burned in her mouth. The smell filled up her nose as the warmth went down her throat. It tickled and burned so she cleared her throat before she took another swig. 

Doc watched without comment, in fact the only thing he did do was ease out of his chair so he could move it a little farther away from the stump. He motioned at it while she was working through the taste of the liquor and deciding if she could get another drink and still be able to drive the rest of the distance to the homestead.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked when she handed the bottle back. “I thought you were living with Bobo at the bar again.”

“Oh I am.”

Nicole dusted the stump off before she sat down. The fire was hot as an oven, baking anyone that was nearby. The cold at her back seemed to turn to steam as it rolled over her shoulders and into the baked-dry heat of the fire in front. She was sweating on one side and not the other. 

She looked at Doc, at the drink and the knife and then at his face. His smile acknowledged he hadn’t answered the question. It explained how he didn’t intend to either. “Do you want a ride back to town? It’s going to get dark soon.”

“Not just yet,” Doc said. He took another drink and moved the bottle to the side of the chair. When he rolled back up to his feet, he didn’t even have the good grace to pretend to be clumsy. Maybe it was a lifetime of practice or the added benefit of immortality, but he’d drank half a bottle of the liquor with no signs that it had done more than keep him warm. “Do you know much about knife throwing, Office Haught?”

“Nicole,” she corrected, “and not as much you.”

“Well, allow me to share the most basic of lessons with you. While some men might say that aim is paramount, I have always believed that more important than where you are looking when you throw is _how_ you throw. And while I have heard some say that you should throw from the elbow, I must respectfully say that they are full of shit.”

You could forget a lot of things by a fire. You could forget about corpses. Demons. Threats. You could forget the man giving you knife-throwing-lessons had killed more people than you wanted to think about. Forget that you were surrounded by demons. Forget you could die out here in this snow.

But the thing she had forgotten, all day, up to this moment, was that Wynonna was pregnant. That Doc didn’t know. That nobody knew. Nobody at all but her and Wynonna.

“How do you throw then?” Nicole asked, because he’d been leading her into it.

Doc’s smile was real for the first time since she’d known him. It was uncomplicated, light, _delighted_. He tossed the knife and caught it by the blade, pinched between his fingers for a split second before his whole body just _moved_. The knife was in the tree across the clearing almost before she realized it had been thrown. And Doc’s voice was full of his smile, and pride, and just enough liquor to make the moment possible. 

He said: “It’s in the _wrist_.”

It was an invitation from a man that had been disappearing right in front of them. She wiped her hands on her pants as she pushed herself back to her feet, “alright, let me try.”

There was that smile again, and he nodded his head as he followed the path of disturbed snow out to the tree and pulled the knife from the splintered bark. When he brought it back, he held it out to her, and like he was worried she might not have the smarts to work it out herself, he said, “but aim _is_ important.”

\--

Officer Haught did indeed give him a lift back to town, just before the last of the light went out of the sky. She was holding the steering wheel with one hand and resting the other in her lap, staring up at the lights of the bar with her jaw clenched shut like she was keeping herself from saying something. 

“I appreciate--” The ride was what he had meant to say.

But Nicole cut into his words, “there’s a new revenant. We found a body today. It didn’t--” Her gaze slid sideways, back toward the safety of the bar lights, “it didn’t even look human anymore. Bobo said it was someone’s brother, said he would come after whoever had told Wynonna where to find his brother.” 

Well then they had to be talking about Vinnie and his remarkably familiar looking brother Bubba.

“Stay safe,” Nicole said. “Let people help you stay safe.” As much as it was meant to be a statement, it came out like a question. Like she was asking him if that was even possible.

“I will do my best.” Whatever his best was in the moment that it mattered. Recent circumstances aside, Doc was a man who preferred to continue living as undisturbed as possible. “I appreciate the ride.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Nicole said to send him on his way.

The bar was middle-of-the-week busy with a beat of music that irritated him for no reason at all. Hui was behind the bar, not even taking the time to nod hello or offer a greeting, doing nothing at all but pointing up the stairs. It wasn’t the same as saying he wasn’t welcome but it certainly wasn’t inviting him to sit and have a drink all the same.

Doc had done all the drinking he needed to do for the day out in the snow. Sipping whiskey to keep himself warm while he worked out what he intended to do about this situation he’d found himself in. A man could not wallow in his wounds for so long without being consumed by them. 

The bruises were healed already and that meant it was time to move on.

He let himself into the one-room-apartment he shared with Bobo, expecting to find the man doing just about anything but standing by the little kitchen sink with his hands gripped tight against the metal basin. He was shirtless, staring so steadily forward and down that one might have thought the faucet had done something to him personally. 

His coat was dropped on the floor in a heap, the shirt he’d been wearing when he walked out of this room this morning was dropped on the floor by his feet. There was a pink-brown stain to the rag in the sink and little drips and drops of the same fading color on Bobo’s skin. Whatever he was feeling was radiating off him like a banked coal, working its way through his skin to light up that mark on his back. 

The fire hadn’t broken fully through the skin but when Doc smoothed his hand across the mark he could feel it boiling just beneath the surface. Bobo didn’t flinch when Doc touched him but he didn’t move either. He didn’t uncoil into the nearness in the way he had just this morning. 

“I can see I have been away longer than I should have been,” he said. Doc wasn’t a man that was above being a little bit ridiculous for his lover’s sake. He didn’t enjoy being made a fool but being in love required a bit of foolishness to start with. He ducked under Bobo’s unmoving arm, slid into the narrow space between the sink and his lover and that put their faces so close together the tips of their noses were just about kissing.

Bobo didn’t _want_ to give in. He didn’t _want_ his lips to pull up at the edge. For his eyes to crinkle in the corners. He didn’t want to refocus his hateful stare on Doc’s face, for it to soften into a fondness he just couldn’t control. He didn’t want his breath to ease out of his mouth heavy and hurt as it was. 

Doc rested his hands on Bobo’s skin, one slid under his arm and curved along the length of his back and the other down at his waist. His hips were pushed against the edge of the counter just to give them a little space to be their own people. There were plenty of things he thought about saying, about how long he’d been gone. About how he was on his way back now.

Some things were just easier to say with actions than words. 

That must have been why Bobo’s arms moved, the cool palms of his hands sliding under the loose hang of Doc’s coat to get at the overheated skin of his back. Bobo’s face ducked down to press against the crook of his neck.

There were questions that needed asking; plenty of answers that needed saying. 

Just then, it was just this, Doc’s arms over Bobo’s, holding him so he’d be safe.


End file.
